UC Berkeley

“Are conversations pathways to the exchange of understandings?” asks poet Claudia Rankine inJust Us: An American Conversation (2020). Or, she wonders, “are conversations accommodations?” This Feeling Tone: The Sound of Black and Jewish Collaboration 1981- 2006, explores these questions by returning to a crucial nexus within American social and cultural history—Black and Jewish-American dialogue—and asking what we gain from actively listening to the voices at play in it.

This Feeling Tone offers fresh interpretations of six key 20th-century American artists bylistening closely to recorded conversations as well as their collaborative poetic and dramatic artworks. I pair them as follows: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich; Anna Deavere Smith and Studs Terkel; and George C. Wolfe and Tony Kushner. By employing interdisciplinary methods—prose description, melodic transcription, and close listening—I explore how sound is inscribed by complex and often unequal power relations. My approach—which crosses disciplines, fields, methodologies, and archives—aims to make such relations more perceptible.

There’s a common historical narrative about “Black-Jewish relations” in the twentieth century,one that suggests that these two identity groups emerged from World War II in a common civil rights coalition but then ended the century at odds. This Feeling Tone challenges this abstract narrative of declining relations with a material history of relationships between six artists/activists. I argue that Lorde and Rich forged a feminist counterpublic by negotiating the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality during public performances of lyric poems. I suggest that Smith invented “headphone theater” by revising Studs Terkel’s tape-recording technique for the stage. And I contend that, together, Tony Kushner and George C. Wolfe inflected Bertolt Brecht and Zora Neale Hurston’s rhythmic aesthetics to redefine the “sung-through” musical for the postmodern era. By studying how these artists labored to confront ethnic, racialized, and gendered histories of sound, This Feeling Tone uncovers a radical and perilous history of collaboration — not as democratic safeguard but as embodied social practice.

This Feeling Tone thus offers a more nuanced answer to Rankine’s question: conversation is botha “pathway”—a means to move across a stage, a way of working through difficulty—and also an “accommodation”: a room, a place, or a space where embodied voices haunt the walls of the house of difference.