The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (Postmillennial Pop, 17)

The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear. 

 

Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see “difference.” At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe.  Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear—voices, musical taste, volume—as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing  compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only register the racial politics of our world, but actively produce them. Through analysis of the historical traces of sounds of African American performers, Stoever reveals a host of racialized aural representations operating at the level of the unseen—the sonic color line—and exposes the racialized listening practices she figures as “the listening ear.”