The book begins just before the U.S. Civil War, and its first two chapters detail the rise of the sonic color line as a function of slavery and a site of contestation for America’s new popular culture industry. Chapter 1 reads slave narratives by Douglass and Jacobs as literary, theoretical, and historical texts, laying bare the starkly racialized sonics of slavery’s power differentials to examine how and why whites technologized listening as racial discipline and revealing how slaves used listening as resistance and self-preservation. Douglass’s and Jacobs’s aural imagery shows how whites constructed sound as irrational and emotional—in Western culture, the province of women and slaves—and mobilized it to fix race and gender in the body. Both develop the trope of the listener to launch pointed critiques of white listening habits and to amplify listening as an avenue of agency for black people in the struggle to hear and free themselves.
However, as chapter 2 makes clear, the antebellum sonic color line wasn’t confined to the South. It structured life in the North as well, as I show through analysis of the concert reviews of two female singers who ascended to center stage in the nation’s burgeoning popular culture industry: “the Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, “the Black Swan.” The growing conflict over women’s rights made these women’s voices hyperaudible sites of raced and gendered conflict in the public sphere, and the racialized tropes of audible “whiteness” and “blackness” emerging from the dueling divas’ media flurry disciplined the dominant U.S. listening ear with raced and gendered logics inflecting scientific breakthroughs regarding timbre and sound vibrations.
Chapter 3 locates the sonic color line’s next big shift during Radical Reconstruction, examining how developing sound recording technology in the 1870s was preceded and anticipated by the intensive repetition of the Jubilee Singers’ corporeal performance and the techniques of phonography explored by writer Chesnutt. Building on Moten’s notion of the intertwined nature of resistance and subjection, this chapter examines “the black voice” itself as a sonic technology of Reconstruction that interrogated and soothed America’s bloody racial history and the rifts of the recent Civil War. Both the Jubilee Singers and Chesnutt used the trope of the listener to gain representational control of the historical memory of slavery, challenging dominant racial narratives locating race in the blood and defining black people as cultureless, uneducable, and unassimilable. The Jubilees and Chesnutt succeeded in shifting definitions of “authentic” blackness away from blackface performance; however, mainstream American media outlets appropriated their representations to shore up a new sonic image of blackness focused on sounds of suffering.
The sonic color line’s third major shift occurred at the intersection of music, sound cinema, and lynching during the Great Depression and the Great Migration. Here the sonic color line skewed toward circumscribing public performances of black masculinity, which I trace by interweaving the late-1930s musical career of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter with the early fiction of his friend and contemporary, author Richard Wright. Folklorist John Lomax strategically sold Lead Belly’s music to white audiences as the thrilling, authentic sound of the “to-be-lynched” body, enabled by and enabling the sonic color line to “match” black male bodies with particular voices and musics. But as synchronous sound cinema displaced “silent” films during this era, the notion of the “sound track” introduced new possibilities for listening that unsettled established relationships between sound and the visual image. Using new cinematic techniques, Wright’s fiction from this period challenges Lomax’s representation of Ledbetter by “soundtracking” lynching and segregation, creating a decolonizing practice intervening in “the ideology of the visible”64 while simultaneously exposing sound’s invisible ideological freight, carrying lynching far beyond the South and racial segregation across spatial color lines.
The book closes amidst World War II’s immediate aftermath, showing how the sonic color line not only enabled the racial formation we now know as “color blindness” but also surreptitiously became race’s lingua franca. Radio, in particular, was a technology of the sonic color line, developing and circulating new acousmatic sonic protocols of racialized sounding and listening no longer dependent on immediate bodily presence. Building upon Ledbetter and Wright’s depictions of the sonic color line within segregated Northern cities, I show how radio broadcasts and production practices reproduced raced and gendered urban spaces and enabled the emerging discourse of color blindness. I begin by investigating the subtle racing of singer Lena Horne’s voice over the 1940s airwaves, focusing on how and why her vocal crossing—and resistant performances—threatened the nation’s underlying racial order. Like Horne, a vocal critic of radio’s increasingly subtle racializations and hidden exclusions, Du Bois critiqued radio via his social theory in Dusk of Dawn, emphasizing America’s movement away from the linear and visual metaphor of the color line to a figuration of race as a plate-glass vacuum chamber, an aural metaphor influenced, I argue, by his work as a behind-the-scenes consultant for CBS Radio’s Americans All, Immigrants All. Du Bois shows the importance of listening—or the lack thereof—to the “wartime racial realignment” of the 1940s,65 where mainstream U.S. culture represented the path to equal citizenship and the achievement of the American Dream as straight and true, even as gross inequities and invisible barriers knocked people of color widely off course. Finally, I amplify Petry’s contributions to a black radio critique. Whereas Horne’s vocal phrasing offered an example of black artistic agency contra the sonic color line and Du Bois’s letters and theories the agency of the writer/producer, Petry’s fiction evokes the trope of the listener to interrogate the agency of black audiences and their efforts to decolonize their listening and disrupt the sonic color line’s (and radio’s) deleterious silences. Thinking these artists together illustrates that if color lines are heard—not just seen—the listening ear continues to operate in covert and extralegal ways, even when a society enacts laws turning a “blind eye” to perceived racial difference.
Reconsidering racialization as a sonic practice allows for a deeper understanding of why both race and racism persist, even as “color-blind” formations of race infuse federal law and political pundits insist America is a “post-racial” nation in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency. Although scholars of race have roundly challenged color blindness,66 it remains the United States’ dominant ideology. The Sonic Color Line argues that American proponents of color blindness have been able to declare race invisible in the twenty-first century precisely because dominant listening practices grounded in antebellum slavery and shaped by segregation continue to render it audible. In what follows, I jam the sonic color line’s aural signals, enabling more equitable listening practices to emerge.
1.
The Word, the Sound, and the Listening Ear
Listening to the Sonic Color Line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents
On July 15, 1836, the Greensborough Patriot published an advertisement seeking information on two runaway slaves. The ad’s writer, a John W. McGehee, asks readers to join him in searching for
two negro men, Solomon and Abram, Solomon is a man twenty years old—black complexion; full face; large mouth; thick lips; coarse voice, large feet; with a burn on his back, received when small—six feet high—well made,—smiles when spoken to—took with him a cloak and frock cloth coat, velvet collar. Abram is about five feet six inches high; black complexion; pert when spoken to; strait[sic], well made man; 26 or 7 years of age; small feet,—fine voice.
Far from unusual, the ad exemplifies the grotesque catalogs commonly printed in Southern newspapers that performatively transformed black subjects into what Hortense Spillers calls “the zero degree of flesh.”1 And one finds several racialized sonic descriptors, tucked away matter-of-factly amongst the litany of white-authored visual stereotypes of “blackness.” Cast by the author as simply another “negro” trait to itemize, sonic qualities such as a “fine voice” were, for mid-nineteenth-century whites, becoming as material and identifiable an