The Sonic Color Line

Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

Jennifer Lynn Stoever

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479835621
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear. Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear—voices, musical taste, volume—as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen—the sonic color line—and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.”
Using an innovative multimedia archive spanning 100 years of American history (1845-1945) and several artistic genres—the slave narrative, opera, the novel, so-called “dialect stories,” folk and blues, early sound cinema, and radio drama— The Sonic Color Line explores how black thinkers conceived the cultural politics of listening at work during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. By amplifying Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Charles Chesnutt, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ann Petry, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lena Horne as agents and theorists of sound, Stoever provides a new perspective on key canonical works in African American literary history. In the process, she radically revises the established historiography of sound studies. The Sonic Color Line sounds out how Americans have created, heard, and resisted “race,” so that we may hear our contemporary world differently.

1.

The Word, the Sound, and the Listening Ear

Listening to the Sonic Color Line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents

On July 15, 1836, the Greensborough Patriot published an advertisement seeking information on two runaway slaves. The ad’s writer, a John W. McGehee, asks readers to join him in searching for

two negro men, Solomon and Abram, Solomon is a man twenty years old—black complexion; full face; large mouth; thick lips; coarse voice, large feet; with a burn on his back, received when small—six feet high—well made,—smiles when spoken to—took with him a cloak and frock cloth coat, velvet collar. Abram is about five feet six inches high; black complexion; pert when spoken to; strait[sic], well made man; 26 or 7 years of age; small feet,—fine voice.

Far from unusual, the ad exemplifies the grotesque catalogs commonly printed in Southern newspapers that performatively transformed black subjects into what Hortense Spillers calls “the zero degree of flesh.”1 And one finds several racialized sonic descriptors, tucked away matter-of-factly amongst the litany of white-authored visual stereotypes of “blackness.” Cast by the author as simply another “negro” trait to itemize, sonic qualities such as a “fine voice” were, for mid-nineteenth-century whites, becoming as material and identifiable an element of blackness as the already culturally embedded “black complexion,” “large mouth,” and “thick lips.” A keyword search of the University of North Carolina’s digital archive of runaway slave ads reveals the ubiquity and iterative quality of such descriptions, with “hoarse voice” first appearing in 1777, and “fine voice” in 1783, with a sharp increase in 1811 that rises throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Other key recurrent descriptors include “loud,” “manly,” “strong,” and/or “whiny,” sonic affects amplifying the gendered binary of race for black men as hypermasculine/feminized. The frequency of such ads suggests white people began perceiving a clear (and rather blunt) difference between the timbral qualities of black and white voices in the nineteenth century. The culturally constructed sonic difference not only marked certain tones, grains, and cadences as “black” but also, by the comparison that ghosts these ads, suggests whites sensed their voices as normative and not easily categorizable. White vocal grains, it seems, could span a range of sounds that were neither “coarse” nor as “loud” or “strong” as “fine” black voices, terms that characterize black timbres as excessive, overly corporeal, and readily describable.

In addition to racializing vocal timbre, the Greensborough Patriot outlines distinct, observable differences that whites perceived between black and white listening practices. Whereas whites, by implication, may have any number of reactions to being “spoken to,” McGehee limited Solomon and Abram’s listening stances to visible signals of obeisance: “smiles” and a “pert” snapping to attention. Notably, McGehee’s ad never imagines either Solomon or Abram as speaking first, identifying the breaking of silence as a sonic privilege of whiteness and revealing how slaveholding whites imagined power flowing directly through acts of disciplined listening. White-authored descriptions of their slaves’ racialized and power-laden listening countenances appear frequently and consistently in UNC’s digital archive; recurrent modifiers that appear either before or after the phrase “when spoken to” in runaway slave ads printed between 1792 and 1840 include having “down eyes” or a “downcast look,” being either “slow of speech” or “speaking quick”—the former suggesting modesty in the face of commanding whiteness and the latter displaying rapid deference—or showing a “smiling” or a “pleasant countenance.” Only rarely do slave masters describe slaves as laughing when spoken to, or looking whites “directly in the eye,” signifying a less-than-submissive listening stance and highlighting how whites read pert smiles and downcast eyes as appropriate visual performances of “black” listening.

Mid-nineteenth-century American whites increasingly used auditory information to inform racial ideologies and to construct racialized identities. Visual fragmentations that dissected black people into metonymic corporeal parts such as “wooly hair, nose flat, lips thick,” catalogued in 1854’s widely read The Races of Man, had long signified the allegedly fixed racial differences justifying slavery’s existence.2 However, as Michael Chaney points out, the trajectory of the “dissolution of the eminence of vision” intersected with “an alternate dynamics of race and vision” fostered by new modes of self-representation by free blacks and former slaves.3 Furthermore, as Jonathan Crary argues, the rise of commodity culture and ocular-illusion-as-entertainment (i.e., the panorama and the camera obscura) further destabilized visual epistemologies.4

Sound both defined and performed the tightening barrier whites drew between themselves and black people, expressing the racialized power dynamics and hierarchical relationships of chattel slavery through vocal tones, musical rhythms, and expressed listening practices marked by whites as “black” and therefore of lesser value and potentially dangerous to whiteness and the power structures upholding it. Functioning as a medium, sound enabled race to be felt, experienced, and affected by white Americans as a collection of fixed sonic desires and repulsions that are taken into the body and radiate out from it. White American elites’ use of racialized sonic descriptors drew on a long but spotty history of linking sound to “Otherness” in pre-nineteenth-century America—the “disjointed aural communities” detailed by Richard Cullen Rath in How Early America Sounded that unevenly represented indigenous peoples, Quakers, and African slaves as “howling” outsiders.5 However, the advent of mass print media and popular musical culture enabled white elites to standardize sonic ideas of Otherness on a heretofore-unimagined scale, disciplining readers’ listening practices through detailed accounts of listening experiences written by an increasingly professionalized cadre of reporters and critics. Furthermore, white elite discourse increasingly amplified and Othered “black” sounds at a moment of great anxiety over defining Americanness amid sectional tensions over slavery.

At this key historical threshold, white elites’ published descriptions of the differences between white and black speech, sounds, environments, and musics spread far beyond intimate speech communities, constructing whites’ centrality and dominance as the American citizen-subjects at the very level of perception. Even as the nation appeared to be dissolving in the 1850s, white elites represented a powerful sensory experience of racialized sonic citizenship on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, a phenomenon that certainly contributed to a relatively speedy reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites after the Civil War. Regardless of their regional location or their feelings concerning slavery, many white elites heard themselves as superior citizens, and they listened to themselves and Others through that privileged, circumscribed, and increasingly standardized filter. I call this dominant racialized filter the listening ear. The listening ear was far from the only listening practice enacted by elite whites during this period and certainly not the only form of listening important in identity construction. As I discussed in the introduction, listening is rich in its multiplicity, and a listening subject develops many filters that operate simultaneously; in fact, a listening subject is comprised of auditory information processed through interactive and intersectional psychological filters that include the habits, assumptions, desires, and repulsions shaped by gender, class, national, regional, and linguistic identities. However uneven and diffused, the listening ear’s emergence during this period, and its transmission to listeners across the American racial spectrum, more firmly interwove whiteness with Americanness, both normalizing the dyad at the heart of citizenship privilege and making it a visceral, tangible, lived experience at the level of auditory perception. In this way, a subject can touch and be touched by the abstraction of race in the form of sound waves—vibrations were increasingly of interest to nineteenth-century physicists, particularly Hermann von Helmholtz—and a subject can cast one’s racial identity out into the world through vocal tones, timbres, music making, soundscape design, noise legislation, music consumption—what Daniel Cavicchi calls “audiencing”6—and through publicly enacting shared forms of exclusionary listening. Listening became a key part of understanding one’s place in the American racial system, viscerally connecting slavery’s macropolitics to lived racial etiquette. The uneven process of building racially disciplined listening through the “ ‘micropenalties’ of disciplinary individuation,”7 as understood by Saidiya Hartman, enabled whites to hear whiteness and blackness as palpably distinct experiences of differing texture, value, quality, and importance, forming what I term the sonic color line.

The racializing of listening, its accordant techniques of body discipline, and the sonic color line enabled by and enabling it, form this chapter’s subject. Racialized sonic politics, I argue, profoundly impacted the ability of black people, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and colonized peoples to claim, enact, and sound their rights in American life, with whites representing black people as the least sonically categorizable as human, let alone as potential citizens. Slave owners, in particular, mobilized the sonic color line as an auditory grammar, which they used to discipline slaves to the white-authored subject position of “blackness,” even as the border coalescing between “black” and “white” sounds, musics, and listening practices cast sonic differences as natural, essential, and immutable. Black listening subjects challenged white-constructed racialized listening practices in ways both subtle and overt: by mobilizing divergent forms of listening, by recoding certain sounds and listening practices as “white” in defiance of American cultural norms deeming whiteness unmarked and unrepresentable, and by using their own standards to construct an alternate value system and aesthetics for sounds they deemed “black.” Furthermore, black subjects survived slavery and resisted America’s racial hierarchies by becoming proficient in multiple forms of racialized listening, slipping in and out of various standpoints to evaluate the micropolitics of any given situation. Since critics such as Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Houston Baker Jr., Barbara Johnson, Mae Henderson, and Michael Awkward recalibrated Mikhail Bakhtin to think through African American literary representation, double-voicedness has been a predominant critical understanding of how black-authored literary texts perform cultural work in a white supremacist society, using discursive strategies such as signifying and irony to simultaneously address black and white readers on different registers and giving any one text multiple meanings.8 While, as Dorothy Hale has explored, African American literary critics aligned double-voicedness with W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “doubleconsciousness” in order to theorize black subject formation through linguistic acts, literary critics have yet to fully explore doubled—and perhaps even tripled—listening practices, the sensory framework that enables the encoding and decoding of doubled address. My exploration of how African American writers represented and deconstructed the sonic color line and the listening ear helps us understand not only the mechanics of double-voicedness—how and why racialized American readers differently experience the same passages, speeches, musics, voices, and ambient sounds—but also how black subjects constituted themselves through and between various conflicted listening practices that they navigated, brokered, and challenged.

The sonic color line emerged as a ubiquitous and palpable force of racialization in nineteenth-century America, particularly in two of the most well-known contemporary critiques of slavery and its mutually constitutive social relations, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). While discursive traces of whites’ use of the sonic color line pepper the popular media of the moment, it was first exposed and rebuked in print by Douglass and Jacobs. Particularly when taken together, their work reveals how white masters and mistresses raced and gendered both sound and listening on the plantation, disciplining themselves and their slaves to the listening ear’s perceptual frame. Most importantly, both writers detail their resistance to the listening ear’s depiction of blackness, highlighting listening as a particularly important site of agency for slaves. African Americans worked to decolonize their listening practices from the inception of the sonic color line, and—co-constitutive with Western imperialization, colonization, and enslavement—they countered the listening ear’s pernicious discipline with individual acts of refusal and communal practices strengthening kinship ties across time and space.

Douglass’s emphasis on the divergent listening practices of black and white subjects in his Narrative shows how they shape (and are shaped by) racial ideologies and everyday disciplinary practices, providing hope that whites could reform their listening ear and that black people can decolonize their listening practices. He exposes and resists the sonic color line while arguing for the importance of slaves’ sounds—in particular, women’s screaming and mixed-gender collective singing—as fundamental to understanding the sensory experience of racism, particularly the construction, gendering, and limitations of the white listening ear and the uneven physical and psychological restraints of white-conditioned listening practices. My reading of Douglass presents a new perspective on a thinker long considered a champion of written literacy and interracial communication, one that considers black listeners alongside his well-documented appeal to “ethnosympathetic” whites.9 I show how Douglass also understood that visual and written modes of knowledge, however unstable, enabled whites to increasingly marginalize sound as emotional and unpredictable—qualities associated with blackness (and femaleness)—even as it continued to perform significant racial labor; however, Douglass also took advantage of publication as a venue to challenge whites’ limited perception and affirm black listeners’ knowledge.

Whereas Douglass’s Narrative takes on the aural edge of racism, Jacobs’s Incidents focuses much more on documenting the aural experience of race, particularly for black women rendered doubly subject to white supremacist patriarchy. Douglass explores the divergent interpretations of black and white men as they listen to white men’s physical abuse of black women, but he does not represent black women as listeners. In Douglass’s Narrative, black women sound; in Jacobs’s Incidents they listen too, developing protective strategies that detect potential sexual abuse and violence in sounds far more subtle than screams. Jacobs’s representation of the intertwined relationship between Linda’s external experience of place and her internal auditory voicings of family provides new understandings of how black people crafted selves and re-storied antebellum environments through embodied listening practices.

In concert, Douglass and Jacobs expose the partiality of white listening practices and the enabling privilege of whites’ purportedly universal interpretations as foundational to white supremacy while simultaneously exploring the sonic color line as a site of possibility, revealing a perceptual gap between black and white audition that harbored life-affirming practices at the microlevel of the senses. Douglass questio...