Sonorous Passages

Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary

Meina Yates-Richard

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478039174
  9781478034247
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062813
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Sonorous Passages, Meina Yates-Richard demonstrates how, within Black Atlantic literary and cultural productions, the sounds of Black maternal figures function as mediators of liberatory thought. Under the press of chattel slavery, Black mothers were discursively rendered as points of passage between freedom and unfreedom in the political imaginary, creating a paradigm wherein Black male subjects came to be imagined as the appropriate heirs and subjects of freedom. Sonorous Passages offers the methodology of "double-listening" as a Black feminist interpretive heuristic through which we are to hear and assess the Black maternal sonority within Black Atlantic textual and sonic objects. Through works ranging from Frederick Douglass's nineteenth-century writings to twenty-first-century literary and sonic art, Sonorous Passages traces how Black maternal figures are conceptually excised from the imaginative realms of Black political freedom, even as the soundings of Black mothers provide protective and generative sites for developing liberatory thought. As Yates-Richard shows, by listening closely to Black maternal sonority, we can access, resound, and reproduce resonant maternal inheritances of freedom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Prologue: I Sound My Grandmother’s Voice, Listening for Freedom
• Introduction. Listening for Black Maternal Sonority
• One. “Your [Memphis] Blues Ain’t Like Mine”: Lynching, Maternal Sonority, and the Echoing South
• Two. “WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?”: Maternal Disavowal, Flight, and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Maternal Pain
• Three. Sounding Ephemeral Freedoms: Hearing, Not Heeding Black Women’s Cries in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Four. Inherited Soundscapes: Michelle Cliff’s Marketwomen and Double-Listening for Black Maternal Resonances
• Five. “Across Distances Without Recognition”: Black Maternal Sonority in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
• Coda. “Music of Future Worlds”: Re-Sounding Freedom
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index