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THE CONTOURS OF THE SONIC COLOR-LINE: SLAVERY, SEGREGATION,
AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF LISTENING
by
Jennifer Lynn Stoever
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2007
Copyright 2007 Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Object Description
| Title | The contours of the sonic color-line: slavery, segregation, and the cultural politics of listening |
| Author | Stoever, Jennifer Lynn |
| Author email | stoever@usc.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | American Studies & Ethnicity |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2007-05-09 |
| Date submitted | 2007 |
| Restricted until | Restricted until 2 July 2009. |
| Date published | 2009-07-02 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Kaplan, Carla |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Jackson-Fossett, Judith Moten, Fred Demers, Joanna |
| Abstract | "The Contours of the Sonic Color-line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening" is a literary, historical, and theoretical examination of the ways in which sound and listening functioned to produce social and racial difference during two significant, interconnected moments in American racial formation: late antebellum slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and the late Jim Crow era in the mid-twentieth. The literary and aural texts I examine -- slave narratives and social realist works -- explicitly responded to and intervened in racial discourse during these periods, representing the uneven power dynamics of U.S. white supremacy in order to dismantle them. In Contours, I argue that two of the most powerful dimensions of these counternarratives of race have heretofore been overlooked: the way in which they represent racism as operating in multiple sensory modalities -- especially sound -- as well as their use of aural imagery to challenge the dominance of visual discourses of race stemming from the Enlightenment. The notion of the visible color-line, made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois, is imbricated with its aural echo, what I term the "sonic color-line."; Through theoretical analysis, close reading, and archival research, I reveal the "sonic color-line" in American culture, an interpretive site where racial difference is produced and policed through the ear. To examine its historical presence, I focus my inquiry on textual soundscapes -- the acoustic spaces created by representations of ambient sound, music, speech, and noise -- and depictions of listening within a range of African-American cultural production from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Folkways recording artist Tony Schwartz. Through contextualized "close listenings" I show how the macropolitics of race and gender become powerful lived historical experiences through the intimate, micro-world of the senses. Just as we have a gaze that is filtered through our subjective lens(es), so too do we have what I call a "listening ear" that is historically embodied and culturally contextual. Far from being vision's binary opposite, sound frequently appears to be visuality's doppelganger -- its unacknowledged but ever-present "other" -- in the construction ofrace and the performance of racial oppression. |
| Keyword | race; African American; the novel; sonic color-line; sound; listening ear |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m577 |
| Rights | Stoever, Jennifer Lynn |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Stoever-20070702 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume40/etd-Stoever-20070702.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | THE CONTOURS OF THE SONIC COLOR-LINE: SLAVERY, SEGREGATION, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF LISTENING by Jennifer Lynn Stoever A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2007 Copyright 2007 Jennifer Lynn Stoever |
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