UC Santa Cruz

Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity is a critique of the tenants of the Western sonic avant-garde through black music. I engage African diasporic music as a critical site where the modernist distinction between human and technology is endlessly challenged and shattered. Early black recordings by George W. Johnson, Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Huddie Williams Ledbetter entered an epistemological nexus between the human and its mechanical double. The phonographic reproduction of black sounds: the prison blues, “coon songs,” simulated black lynching and early jazz recordings, was often enlisted to secure sentimental ideas of black inhumanity while affirming the prowess of sonic technologies. Yet, I argue that precisely through this impasse of the nonhuman, fugitive forms of black sonic experimentation were realized. I track how the emergence of experimental African diasporic musics in the 1960’s actually owes a dialogical debt to the recording conditions of earlier black artists. By mapping this experimental genealogy of black music I explore how black sounds bring to crisis the Eurocentric ideals of the human, the avant-garde and sonic technology. I examine the musical investigations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the 1960’s, the sonic experiments of Jamaican dub producers/engineers in the early 1970’s, and the contemporary sound art of African diasporic and post-colonial Arab artists, all of whom have reconfigured the racialized and colonial legacies of sonic technologies.