The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen

Nathalie Aghoro

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501361395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Sound positions individuals as social subjects. The presence of human beings, animals, objects, or technologies reverberates into the spaces we inhabit and produces distinct soundscapes that render social practices, group associations, and socio-cultural tensions audible. The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen unites interdisciplinary perspectives on the social dimensions of sound in audiovisual and literary environments. The essays in the collection discuss soundtracks for shared values, group membership, and collective agency, and engage with the subversive functions of sound and sonic forms of resistance in American literature, film, and TV.

Part I

Sound Practice across Media

1

Listening in Print¹

Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

When accepting the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters on November 6, 1996, Toni Morrison reflected on peace. “There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war,” Morrison begins. “The peace I am thinking of,” she continues, “is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one – an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in.”² She cautions that the peace emerging from such a dance needs to be intentionally secured and “warrants vigilance”; it is not one to take for granted.³ For Morrison, the fast pace of our busy culture endangers such peace. So, too, does “the physical danger to writing suffered by persons . . . who live in countries where the practice of modern art is illegal and subject to official vigilantism and murder.”⁴ Her metaphor of the dancing mind envisions such intentional work as vital collaborative co-creation across difference: “Its real life is about creating and producing and distributing knowledge; about making it possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed to experience one’s own mind dancing with another’s.”⁵ Morrison’s metaphor is one through which knowledge becomes accessible to all. Knowledge, then, is not a thing acquired. Instead, it is about intentional engagement, process, action, meaning making and meaning sharing in relation to another. For Morrison, how we engage in the reading and writing life is an essential, relational dance.

It is not surprising that Morrison offers a musically infused metaphor—a dancing mind—to describe the dynamic and vital relationship between readers, writers, and the pages of texts. Dubbing Morrison “a rebel sister theorist of music,” Daphne Brooks reminds us of Morrison’s musicianship; along with fiction and essays, she authored lyrics and operas that demonstrated her understanding and valuing of “music as an insurgent expression of black interiority” and “one of the most potent forms we have to dissect America’s racial complexities and to affirm the prodigious expanse of black humanity.”⁶ Morrison was deeply committed to “restoring the articularity of sound” to print and to the literary form of the novel in particular.⁷ Her aesthetic was one that worked to create the kinds of novels that would possess “a non-book quality, so that they would have a sound . . . like somebody was telling you a story.”⁸ Rooting her writing in oral storytelling traditions as well as music, Morrison was invested in creating speakerly literature; she “wanted the sound to be something [she] felt was spoken and more oral and less print.”⁹ On the printed page, music was an essential part of this sonic restoration project. So, too, was the possibility Morrison heard in language printed on the storytelling page.

If we extend the musical and performative metaphor of the dancing mind further, we become attuned to the reader’s need to engage texts with a listening mind as well. Or, as I explore in my book Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, to consider the possibilities of listening in print. Race Sounds amplifies listening as a multimodal, relational, contextual, fully embodied dynamic continuum of sonic practices that engage actively in meaning making.¹⁰ As such, Race Sounds and the listening it demonstrates self-reflexively question how positionality—specifically race, class, and gender positionality—influence the ways in which we are able to make sense of sound in all the ways it is transmitted to and through us. In this project, a reader, writer, or cultural participant adopts the positionality of a listener who listens as, with, and within. Listening functions as an aural form of agency, as an essential practice of citizenship, as aural empathy, as an ethics of community building, as social action, as cultural revision strategy, and as a practice of historical thinking and witnessing. The specific discourses of African American literary studies, Black Feminist literary and cultural studies, and Sound Studies intersect in Race Sounds in order to, as I put it, “enliven how we read, write, and critique texts but also to inform how we might be more effective audiences for each other and against injustice in our midst.”¹¹

In this chapter, I listen back to Race Sounds, tuning in again to the multifaceted emergent practice of listening that I examined in that project, particularly as it plays on the literary page. Here, I explore further the aural practices that listening in print engages through sampling (read/hear: like sampling in hip-hop) a few ways in which write rs create space for readers to listen. These samples do not weave together to suggest one correct way to listen. Instead, they are offered as sonic sites through which diverse and productive outcomes of a dynamic range of listening practices and their possibilities can emerge.

Sample 1: Listening in Print as a Discrepant Practice

If, as Nathaniel Mackey asserts, “The page and the ear coexist. Not only do they coexist, they can contribute to one another,” then how does one read as a listener?¹² In Race Sounds, I coined the phrase listening in print in order to describe the listening practices that work to allow “the page” and “the ear” to coexist and contribute to each other’s expressivity and possibility. Key to the practices of listening in print is the work of unmuting print in order to listen—or tuning to the other side of printed language. Philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara refers to listening as “the other side of language,” the side that we “tend to ignore” because Western thought is predominantly focused on speech.¹³ Fiumara’s project argues for the need to understand logic—the Greek logos—more fully, for “there could be no saying without hearing, no speaking which is not also an integral part of listening, no speech which is not somehow received.”¹⁴ This fuller understanding of logos is crucial, for instance, to the health of a society. As Fiumara suggests, “if we are apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse, we might perhaps promote a different sort of coexistence among humans: not so much in the form of a utopian ideal but rather as an incipient philosophical solidarity capable of envisaging the common destiny of the species.”¹⁵ We will return to this idea in the conclusion of this chapter.

While other literary traditions engage in sonic practices, I chose to focus in my book on African American literary and cultural texts particularly because, as Robert Stepto asserts, Black texts persuade readers to act as “storylisteners,” that is, “to seek the kind of communal relationship found, for example, between preachers and congregations, musicians and audiences in certain performance venues, and between storytellers and storylisteners.”¹⁶ Here, Stepto situates literary texts alongside particular Black sonic cultural practices in dynamic sites (specifically the church and the theater) that amplify the power of communal meaning-making and knowledge sharing. By extension, rather than a solitary practice, reading, then, claims a rootedness in relational creative practices. In this paradigm, “readers become hearers, with all that that implies in terms of how one may sustain through reading the responsibilities of listenership as they are defined in purely performative contexts.”¹⁷ In amplifying the importance of the storylistener, Stepto—in resonance with Toni Morrison and other Black writers discussed in Race Sounds—positions the printed text as full of sonic possibility.

Bruce R. Smith, however, reminds us that even when we consider print on its own, we need to remember that literacy has not always been imagined or practiced as a mute, inflexible, “monolithic entity.”¹⁸ In his study of print culture in the early modern world, Smith explains that “where twenty-first-century students are likely to see only marks imprinted on paper – or, ignoring the imprintedness entirely, the concepts that those marks encode,” early modern readers “would . . . have heard traces of sound” in “woodcut illustrations, in handwriting, and in print.”¹⁹ Even when we read silently to ourselves, Elaine Scarry explains, “the spoken words are acoustically imaged rather than actually heard.”²⁰ Print, then, calls on the reader to not just see, but also to tune in as a multisensory being to the sounds embedded in print materials—and particularly to literature that insists on the intimate and explicit, rather than separate or implicit, relationship between print and sound.

By extension, listening is not a fixed, monolithic way of sensing and making sense. Instead, practicing reading in this aural manner—a listening in print—means remaining mindful of what Mackey refers to as discrepancies between print and the sonic life of words. As Mackey explains, discrepant engagement operates “in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world. Such practices highlight—indeed inhabit—discrepancy, engage rather than seek to ignore it.”²¹ It is useful here, too, to note the Latin discrepāre, to crack or creak. Rooted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen
• Part I Sound Practice across Media
• Part II Soundtracks of Collective Memory
• Part III Social Acoustics and Politics of Sound
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright