Phonographies

Weheliye Alexander Ghedi Weheliye

Description

Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman. Highlighting how black authors, filmmakers, and musicians have actively engaged with recorded sound in their work, Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture, of what he terms "sonic Afro-modernity." He shows that by separating music and speech from their human sources, sound-recording technologies beginning with the phonograph generated new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. Black artists used these new possibilities to revamp key notions of modernity-among these, ideas of subjectivity, temporality, and community. Phonographies is a powerful argument that sound technologies are integral to black culture, which is, in turn, fundamental to Western modernity.Weheliye surveys literature, film, and music to focus on engagements with recorded sound. He offers substantial new readings of canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, establishing dialogues between these writers and popular music and film ranging from Louis Armstrong's voice to DJ mixing techniques to Darnell Martin's 1994 movie I Like It Like That. Looking at how questions of diasporic belonging are articulated in contemporary black musical practices, Weheliye analyzes three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical acts: the Haitian and African American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and black British artist Tricky and his partner Martina. Phonographies imagines the African diaspora as a virtual sounding space, one that is marked, in the twentieth century and twenty-first, by the circulation of culture via technological reproductions-records and tapes, dubbing and mixing, and more.

Sujets

• USA
• África
• Cultural studies
• États-Unis
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386933
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Phonographies

Phonographies

Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

Alexander G. Weheliye

Duke University Press

Durham and London



©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Designed by CH Westmoreland

Typeset in Minion with

Helvetica Neue display by Tseng

Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

‘‘[The Negro] is not a visitor in the West, but a citi- zen there, and American; as American as the Ameri- cans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the

Americans who love him—the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than them- selves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he repre- sented was inescapable. . . . The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American

continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man too. . . . This world is no longer white, and it will never be white again.—James Baldwin

Lifting up from the circles and grooves of a record can change the weather. From freezing to hot to cool. —Toni Morrison

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation.—W. E. B. Du Bois

Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat . . . . In- stead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you

are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.—Ralph Ellison

I wanna wind your little phonograph, just to hear your little motor moan.—Robert Johnson

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Intro:It’s Beginning to Feel Like . . .

1Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity





2‘‘I Am I Be’’: A Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity

3In the Mix



4Consuming Sonic Technologies

5Sounding Diasporic Citizenship





Outro:Thinking Sound/Sound Thinking (Slipping into the Breaks Remix) 

Notes



Works Cited

Index







Acknowledgments

The genre rules that I am subject to here require a listing of debts owed to various persons. However, given the stifling economization of so many aspects of life in late capitalism, I prefer to think of such contributions to life and work as aneconomic gifts. As I discuss in my book, the gift, as theorized by Du Bois and several others, functions as both an offering and a poison, and that is what these people have given me, by offering their thoughts, time, energy, and the like while at the same time ‘‘poisoning’’ my thought. They have become voices, apparitions, images, smells, sounds, and so on in my body and mind, enabling me to think and live above, below, beyond, and beside that possessive pronoun ‘‘my,’’ and for that I am forever grateful. Let me commence by thanking a group of intellectuals whose work has sustained me: Stuart Hall, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. In the years that I have spent thinking about and writing this book, these thinkers, individually and as a group, offered me a vital model for intellectual inquiry. I have also greatly benefited from various men- tors and teachers, particularly Elke Stenzel and Ulla Haselstein, who pro- vided challenges and support in high school and college, and Abena P. A. Busia, Bruce W. Robbins, and Cheryl A. Wall, who, as my graduate men- tors offered me a mixture of critical acuity, generosity, understanding,