My Voice, My Rights, My Freedom, My Life.
âI canât breathe.â
âPoetry has its roots in human breath and what would become of us if this breath diminished?â
Giorgos Seferis1
When we think of racial difference today, we think of visual markers: skin colour, facial features, eye colour, hair. But race is also something that we hear. As the musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim observes, if the colour of oneâs skin is a visible marker of race, âvoice is equally objectified, entrained, and used as a âmeasureâ of raceâ.2 When the co-prosecutor in the 1995 O. J. Simpson murder trial asked a witness âThe second voice that you heard sounded like the voice of a black man; is that correct?â, the assumption behind his question was that all African American voices possess a unique vocal quality.3 That question, as Eidsheim notes, rests on two further assumptions, namely that racial â and gendered â identity is essential and inherent, and that this identity is expressed in the voice. Drawing on the insights of the French composer Pierre Schaeffer, Eidsheim argues that the question âWho, or what, made that sound?â assumes that listeners hear voices in terms of âpreconceived essence and meaningâ.4 Schaeffer turns that question â âWho, or what, made that sound?â â back on the listener to ask what he calls âthe acousmatic questionâ. Referring to the Larousse dictionary definition of an âacousmaticâ sound as âun bruit que lâon entend sans voir les causes dont il provientâ (âa sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind itâ), Schaeffer asks listeners to disregard the source and intentions of a musical sound and to analyse only âthe perceptual realityâ of that sound.5
For Eidsheim, the acousmatic question â not âWho made that sound?â but âWhat do I hear?â â asks us to be aware of our propensity to hear race as an essence in Black voices and thus to fail to recognise that the distinctive tonality, pitch and timbre of those voices is not an essence but the product of specific histories and experiences: âenculturation, technique and style, and an infinity of unrealized manifestationsâ.6 What we hear is an effect of our preconceptions. We racialise Black voices.
In this chapter I argue that the racialisation of voices has a long history, which can be traced back to antiquity and the European Middle Ages and which still shapes the way that we hear a supposed âessenceâ of race in voices today. By âracialisationâ I mean those practices and processes of race-making that belong to a time before the âinventionâ of race as a concept and through which, in Geraldine Hengâs words, âessentialisms are posited and assigned ⊠so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatmentâ.7 Heng argues that by intentionally deploying the vocabulary of âraceâ before the invention of race we will be able to bear witness to âthe impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices and institutions in the medieval periodâ that would not otherwise be recognised as part of the history of race and racism.8 But I include more than the sound of race in that history. Judgements about whether a voice sounds âlike the voice of a black manâ are also aesthetic judgements. At the end of this chapter I ask what it means to put race and poetics together at a moment in US history when Black people are struggling to breathe or are dying because the breath has been choked out of them.9
Hengâs metaphor â âthe invention of raceâ â turns on the double meaning of âinventionâ that was common in medieval Latin and European vernaculars, as well as in antique and premodern rhetorical theory, namely the finding of something (an object; material for the composition of a text) and the act of reinvention that transforms that material into something new.10 The fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate, for example, remarked on the pleasure that poets take in âthis the sotil fourme [skilful manner], / Be [By] newe invencioun thynges to transfourmeâ.11 Poetic creation is not ex nihilo but is combinatory. It takes things that are known and turns them into a new object. Rhetorical invention traces a paradoxical movement of finding and repurposing, a movement that works both backwards and forwards in time. If the past furnishes material for the present, then the past is always in some sense intelligible to, and contemporaneous with, the present. Yet the transformational nature of invention means that neither the past nor the present is identical to each other or to themselves. Heng says that âthe story of race ⊠re-begins again and againâ, as if that story were condemned to repeat itself in the same way that trauma repeats the past, but the repeated history of race does not mean that scholars today must always repeat the same story about it.12
One way to change that story is for academics to attune themselves to raceâs social and institutional forms. Wan-Chuan Kao has recently called for white scholars in the field of medieval studies to ârecognizeâ medievalists of colour, intellectually, culturally and professionally â that is, to acknowledge them and their work, to cite them, to centre them, to honour them. He has also called for âa practice of ⊠attunement that moves us from fragility to engagement, intention to investment, and identity to actionâ.13 Kaoâs call to move the field in a direction that is âattunedâ to race is by no means an exclusively US issue. Britons played a major part in the history of US racism and are only now beginning in appreciable numbers to come to terms with their involvement in that history. As the US historian Annette Gordon-Reed observes, âAmerican-style racism has a British pedigreeâ, one based in âEnglish attitudes to race, particularly the negative views about blackness that Englishmen brought with them when they crossed the Atlantic to the New Worldâ.14 Although I am still learning what it means to practise âa scholarship or pedagogy of recognitionâ that does not replicate, in Kaoâs words, âthe blind spotsâ of the past â the âgovernance of differenceâ, the political and institutional failure to address structures of inequality â I want to suggest that Schaefferâs acousmatic question, which Eidsheim inflects in relation to Black voices, might be a metaphor for practising a pedagogy of recognition and attunement. When we hear race in Black voices as an essence, we either tune out the individual history and culture of Black people, or we tune them in only to misrecognise them as cultural stereotypes. The acousmatic question demands a listening that is engaged and intentional. It asks white people to listen better.
The racialisation of voices precedes the invention of race in the fifteenth century.15 The most salient form of that racialisation within late medieval western Europe is the characterisation by Christians of the voices of non-Christian peoples as inarticulate, and the comparison of their voices to those of nonhuman animals.16 The Dominican friar Simon of Saint-Quentin, a white, European Christian who accompanied Ascelin of Lombardyâs mission to the Mongol (Tatar) empire in central Asia in 1247 and who wrote an eyewitness account of that mission, compared the voices of non-Christian Mongols to the voices of bulls and wolves: âThe Tartars [sic] speak in an argumentative and noisy manner from a fierce and horrible gullet; singing they bellow like bulls or howl like wolves, issuing forth inarticulate vocalisations in their singing.â17 As the musicologist Justin Stoessel notes, Simonâs dehumanising rhetoric is an instance of the âdiscourse of animalityâ, Cary Wolfeâs term for âthe use of that constellation of signifiers to structure how we address others of whatever sort (not just nonhuman animals) ⊠[which] has historically served as a crucial strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans â a strategy whose legitimacy and force depend, however, on the prior taking for granted of the traditional ontological distinction, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animalsâ.18 In medieval Christendom, the discourse of animality operated as a racialising strategy, seeking (in Stoesselâs words) âthrough a process of alienation to define morally or theologically the Latin Westâs place in the worldâ â that is, its pre-eminent place.19 Mel Chen addresses the racialising process within this discourse more directly than Wolfe, borrowing and adapting a linguistic term of âpolitical grammarâ called an âanimacy hierarchyâ, a model that âconceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priorityâ.20 Chen is concerned with the degrees of âlivenessâ that these categories may be said to display, but uses âanimacyâ rather than âlifeâ, not only in order to undo binaries but also to trouble the distinctions between perceived degrees of animacy/intimacy within the genus homo, distinctions that sort human subjects into the human and the less than human.
As Stoessel notes, Simon of Saint-Quentinâs characterisation of the voices of his Tatar hosts as âinarticulate vocalisationsâ had a precise meaning in thirteenth-century Latin Europe, one derived from the definitions of spoken utterances by late antique grammarians, including Donatus (fl. mid-fourth century CE) and Priscian (fl. 500 CE), who was, incidentally, from Caesarea, a Roman colony in Roman-Berber north Africa, now modern Algeria.21 In his taxonomy of vocal utterances (voces), Priscian sorts those vocalisations into a fourfold hierarchy according to their intelligibility: vox articulata (articul...