On the lower frequencies: Listening and African American expressive culture.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the most influential and foundational texts in contemporary African American and Black Feminist literary studies, music and vernacular forms function as the locus of an authentic black cultural identity. Despite the audible culture that permeates this field, very little attention has been given to the role of listening in interpretive work. Seeking at once to argue and to account for an emphasis on audition in African American and Black Feminist literary and cultural studies, this dissertation examines the possibilities and difficulties of listening as a cultural, intellectual, and political practice. It argues most fundamentally that listening is a process---a critical and artistic practice that changes given the pressures various historical, cultural, social, political, or technological moments can bring to bear. This study foregrounds an act of listening that is self-aware and intentional, thereby allowing for an exploration of how aural practices have generated particularly useful and sometimes limiting notions of black racial identity over time. This dissertation argues that it is listening's ability to make audible otherwise inaudible aspects of black culture and to test and critique prevailing assumptions in cultural theory that make it at once important and political. Methodologically, this study draws on African American, Black Feminist, and Feminist critical approaches, reader-response and Reception Studies, as well as Complexity Theory and the emerging field of Sound Studies as a way to explain how sound and listening culturally and materially mediate notions of difference. It combines analysis of literary texts with discussions of sound recordings, historical testimony, and photographs. This material in turn provides a foundation for examining how and why listening matters so profoundly in select African American literary texts. Ultimately, in isolating listening and listening culture, this dissertation aims towards a more precise understanding of the connections and conflicts between perceptions of sound and ideas about racialized, gendered and classed bodies.