ABSTRACT
Coloniality—the commutation of regional differences into fixed, “natural” ones indexed to hierarchies of power and value—suffuses the very processes by which thinkers come to conceive sound as meaningful. This chapter tracks the ways writers and theorists have developed sound’s meaning, from William Wordsworth drawing on the language of rural workers in late-eighteenth-century England through Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist writing. It engages W. E. B. Du Bois’ early framing of the “Sorrow Songs” enslaved Africans produced as nationalist music and the ambiguities electric sound recording and early ethnography produce when they reduce black song to a set of techniques universally available. Discussing modernist ideas of the “primitive” and the “folk” through the Black Arts era, the chapter then turns to a discussion of some contemporary approaches that figure racialized sound as disfiguring element within philosophical discourses that rely on unacknowledged colonial tropes and ideologies. It ends with a call for building on those interventions in critical theory to elaborate a fully materialist sound studies.
