"I am I be": The subject of sonic Afro-modernity

Boundary 2

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 97-114

  Weheliye, Alexander G ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949545282     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-30-2-97     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Any debate about the recent history of the U.S. academic humanities might benefit from consulting Hortense Spillers's magisterial "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Postdate," boundary 221, no. 3 (1994): 65-116.
2. For Sylvia Wynter's arguments, see "Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters," in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed. Bianard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 141-202;
3. "On Disenchanting Discourse: 'Minority' Literary Criticism and Beyond," in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 432-69.
4. See Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, 37-49.
5. De La Soul, "I Am I Be," Buhloone Mind State (New York: Tommy Boy Records, 1993).
6. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially chaps. 1 and 3;
7. Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
8. David Laing, "A Voice without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890's," Popular Music 10, no. 1 (1991): 1-9.
9. See Thomas Y. Levin, "For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" October 55 (1990): 38, 40-41;
10. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Form of the Phonograph Record," trans. Thomas Y. Levin, October 55 (1990): 60.
11. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 97-147.
12. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), xxv-xxvi and passim.
13. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 11.
14. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191.
15. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.
16. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 13: "[T]o see around corners is enough (that is not that unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action." While hearing around corners might mitigate activity, certainly it does not prohibit critical thinking. Subsequent quotations from this work are cited parenthetically as IM.
17. See the arguments on behalf of the fluidity of the sonic in Steven Connor, "The Modern Auditory I," in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1997), 203-23.
18. For a psychoanalytic version of this argument, which interprets all listening practices as harking back to a presymbolic oceanic mirror stage, see David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
19. Ralph Ellison, "Living with Music," in Shadow and Act (1955; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1995), 187-89.
20. Ralph Ellison, "That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview," in Shadow and Act, 4. Ellison also evokes his radio hobby when pontificating on the role of music in his life, linking both his status as a musician and radio hobbyist with his proclivity for creating things.
21. Kier Keightley, "Turn It Down!' She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948-59," Popular Music 15, no. 2 (1996): 160.
22. Eric Sundquist, ed., Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man": A Bedford Documentary Companion (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 115.
23. Wynter, "On Disenchanting Discourse," 452.
24. Perhaps the protagonist's invisibility can be described, in Hortense Spillers's formulation, as both "a signifying property plus [and minus]." Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65.
25. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
26. See also David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
27. For a discussion of visual modernity that takes in questions of race, consult Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 21-42.
28. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (1952; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112.
29. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989), 5; my emphasis.
30. For a more detailed consideration of Du Bois's ruminations on racialization as it cuts across vision and sound, see Alexander Weheliye, "In the Mix: Hearing the Souls of Black Folks," Amerikastudien/ American Studies 45, no. 4 (fall 2000): 535-54.
31. Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 84.
32. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Transcendence of Words," in The Emmanuel Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (London: Blackwell, 1989), 147.
33. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, "Originary Displacement," boundary 2 27, no. 3 (fall 2000): 250.