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Introduction: Listening to American Studies


Kara Keeling and Josh Kun

Why is it so difficult for so many people to listen? Why do they start talking when theres something to hear? - John Cage in the documentary Sound I remember everything Ive ever heard. Every dropped nickel, raindrop drip-drop, sneaker squeak, and sheep bleat. Every jump rope chant, Miss Mary Mack Mack hand clap, and eenie meanie chili beanie oop bop-bop bellini method for choosing whos it. I remember every sappy R&B radio lyric and distorted Hendrix riff. Every Itzhak Perlman pluck and squishy backseat contorted make-out session. I can still hear every Hey you, You the man, and John Philip Sousa euphonium toot and every tree rustle and street-corner hustle. I remember every sound Ive ever heard. Its like my entire life is a song I cant get out of my head. Paul Beatty, Slumberland Now I will do nothing but listen... Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

s we began to work on this special issue of American Quarterly, we were introduced to 2487, a sound art installation by the Mexican artist Luz Mara Snchez. Originally commissioned in 2006 by ArtSpace San Antonio, 2487 began as a gallery installation but now lives on as a digital online composition. Its title comes from the 2,487 of the estimated 8,000 people who have died while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States since 1993, and the piece consists of recordings of Snchez speaking each name in her own voice. With a single mouse click to start the performance, the recordings are played back according to a randomized score of alternately halting and accelerating rhythms, unpredictable silences and overlaps, sudden delays and hurried repetitions, a score that corresponds, she claims, to organic patterns much like migration patterns themselves. Making sound signify migration patterns and thereby helping us to know and feel migration differently, Snchez creates a sonic litany of the lost and the vanished that both speaks their otherwise silenced namescold clerical entries on Border Patrol and human rights organizations databasesand keeps their memory alive through sonic performance. Snchez speaks and records the 2, 487 names so that not one of

2011 The American Studies Association

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them remains unspoken or unrecorded, so that they become part of a composition other than silence.1 2487 foregrounds some of the key impulses that originally encouraged us to call for this special issue on sound. What role can sound play in analyzing contemporary debates around empire, immigration, and national culture? Where is sound in the cultural and political legacies of American culture and where is it in the long history of U.S. nation-building? What role have hearing and listening played in American formations of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, community, and class, and how has the birth of recorded sound in the late nineteenth century informed those formations? How are new sound technologies and sonic media practices impacting American identities in the age of globalization? What are the political economies of sound? Does citizenship have a sound? Is there such a thing as what Henry David Thoreau described in Walden as the broad, flapping American ear?2 We wanted to explore these questions from within the field of American studies at a moment when the study of sound and listening is suddenly more ubiquitous than ever. There was a time when the study of sound as something beyond a scientifically measurable set of frequencies and vibrations was the obscure domain of a small cadre of ear-obsessed scholars who gathered quietly at conferences, squeezed papers on sound cultures into their otherwise nonnoisy research agendas and publishing records, rallied behind cries of sound matters! and listen!, all while united by a collective sense of marginalization by the nagging dominance of the visual, that perennially repeating champ in the battle of the senses. In the west, choosing to study sound has always been choosing to take the silver. Vision has traditionally been linked to reason, knowledge, science, truth and rationality; sound is seen as fleeting and ephemeral, mystical, subjective and contingent. The former gives you evidence, the latter only hearsay. The era of sounds marginality in American studies scholarship, however, seems to be over, as more and more scholars across a variety of disciplines are beginning to not only take the culture, consumption, and politics of sound seriously but are making it the centerpiece of their research, publishing, and pedagogy. While there has undoubtedly been an upsurge of scholarly interest in the senses more generally, particular attention to sound (an ear-focused movement away from what Martin Jay dubbed ocularcentrism) has proven particularly attractive to a diverse range of contemporary thinkers.3 This trend is perhaps attributable to an ongoing project to dismantle dominant hierarchies of knowledge production and critical thought that, since at least the late 1960s, has been articulated powerfully by scholars working within

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postmodernism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and indeed American studies in general. The increase in scholarly attention to sonic phenomena is also perhaps attributable to more recent, turn of the twenty-first century innovations in audio technology and new media practices. As so many communications, media, and digital humanities scholars have been arguing, internet platforms and digital networking tools have democratized the tools of media production in ways that have arguably made the recording, production, and personalization of sound more of an everyday and individually organized practice than ever before. Everyday practices of sound production and consumption, and their accompanying practices of sound-thinking, continue to rise to the forefront of contemporary sensory behavior and experience, whether its the proliferation of mobile music devices, playlist libraries, and cloud storage capabilities or the popularity of GarageBand software, streaming audio, sonic social media sites, archival music blogs, localized oral history projects, and geo-tagged local sound maps.4 The influence of these shifts in both epistemology and practice on soundbased scholarship has been profound. This very fall alone, for example, cultural historian Elena Razlogova will publish The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, Hillel Schwartz will unleash his mammoth, 900-page study Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, the journal differences will release a wide-ranging special issue on The Sense of Sound, and Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld will publish their edited collection, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, complete with 23 chapters on everything from ornithological field recordings and cochlear implants to digital games and iPods. Last year, the leading interdisciplinary journal Social Text published its own sound special issue focusing on the production and consumption of sound recordings, noting the current excitement, audible across a number of disciplines, about new ways of studying sound and sound reproduction from cultural and historical perspectives, and only months after, in the Annual Review of Anthropology, a group of anthropologists advocated for a sounded anthropology.5 Prompted by calls by James Clifford and Viet Erlmann for attention to the ethnographic ear and inspired by the long-standing and highly influential audio-anthropological scholarship of Steven Feld, they used R. Murray Schafers foundational 1977 concept of soundscapesor sonic environmentsas an opening for anthropologists to think about the enculturated nature of sound, the techniques available for collecting and thinking about sound, and the material spaces of performance and ceremony that are used or constructed for the purpose of propagating sound.6 Schafer developed

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these ideas in his now classic volume The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, a sweeping historical tour of transformations in sonic phenomena and sonic experience and an uninhibited call for a world with less noise, that as you will see on the pages that follow, has certainly left its mark on many essays included in this volume. Schafer argued that no historian has ever listened to history, that is, listened to those who were listening, yet, it would turn out that among the earliest adopters to sonic critical inquiry were historians themselvesand especially relevant to the aims of this special issue, scholars of U.S. history in particularwho in the 1980s and 1990s began facing the challenge of writing histories of sound during eras that pre-date the birth of recorded sound.7 The world of unrecorded sound is irreclaimable, wrote historian Leigh Eric Schmidt, who explored loud piety and sound Christians in his 2002 Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Almost all of early history is eerily silent and so, to evoke those stilled and faded voices, the historian must act as a kind of necromancer.8 Historians such as Robert Blair St. George, Mary Beth Norton, and Kathleen Brown paid early attention to the politics and cultures of early American speech, while Mark M. Smith, the historian of nineteenth century America who has been so crucial to historys sonic turn, advocated for the study of how sounds have been perceived in the past through what he termed historical soundscape studies.9 In his influential 2000 essay for the Journal of the Historical Society, Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America, Smith showed how nineteenth century ideas of progress were linked to sounds of work and industry (the cadence of hammers), how plantations ran according to an aural social order of managed sound and noise, and how racial and ethnic otherness, while so traditionally rooted in visual terrains of exclusion and biological racism, were also aurally constructed, from the whoops and peals of Native American savagery to the incomprehensible noise of black speech and black song. Sound was an index of identity, and as Smith argued,
If we listen to antebellum America, we hear that modernity, capitalism, freedom, and constructions of gender, class, and otherness had distinct and meaningful aural components. It also suggests that workers, black and white, understood the power of silence and the control of sound as tools of effective resistance to their enslavement and exploitation.10

Following in Smiths wake was historian Richard Rath who listened farther back in his 2003 How Early America Sounded. Examining everything from chapel acoustics to the howling wilderness to the sounds of devilish possession, Rath

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emphasized not only the importance of sound to developing a more dynamic, multi-sensory history of early American life, but the importance of sound to early America itself, when sounds, he insists repeatedly throughout the book, had more value to listeners than they do to any of his readers. Rath proposed that scholars listen for what he called soundways, or the paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniquesin short, the ways that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and beliefs about sound.11 These investigations into American sound history are crucial texts for American studies scholars interested in developing sound-based research agendas and have deeply informed and inspired our aims in organizing this volume. Several of the essays included here build on their work in dynamic and meaningful ways. For example, Asma Naeems contribution to this volume, Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewings A Reading, Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph, focuses on what Dewings 1897 painting offers to better understand changing Gilded Age perceptions of sound, listening, and gender; and Alex W. Blacks Abolitions Musical Bodies: Harriet Beecher Stowes The Christian Slave and Black Performance examines the ways that sound is imbricated in abolitionists texts, especially those that record black womens performances. In his essay An Indian in a White Mans Camp: Johnny Cashs Indian Country Music, Dustin Tahmahkera traces early American conceptions of Indian sounds and the clash between Indian soundscapes and settler soundscapes through the more contemporary recordings of iconic country singer Johnny Cash. No less influential on this volume is the work of art history and communications scholar Jonathan Sterne who featured the history of U.S. sound reproduction (as a means of doing a history of sound) in his landmark study, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. While we are all too familiar with the Enlightenment, Sterne argued, we have all but ignored what he termed the Ensoniment, the period between 17501925 when the world became audible in new ways, and new listening practices and sonic epistemes were born through the massive transformations of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century society, technology, and culture. In the wake of the advent of sound reproduction technologies like the stethoscope, the telephone, and the phonograph and the audile techniques they engendered among their users, for the first time in American history, sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music.12 Sternes important contribution not only influenced the way we conceptualized this volume, but has clearly left its mark on so many of the scholars included here who explore

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the legacies of those audile techniques in more contemporary settings. In his Intimate Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927 1962, D. Travers Scott uses telephone instructional films to re-examine the relationship between telephony, consumption, and the maintenance of social hierarchies; Mack Hagood takes up noise-canceling headphones as techniques of neoliberal selfhood in Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space; and for Art M. Blake, its the CB radio that is a technique of African American audiomobility and audible citizenship. We also see this special issue in conversation with the flurry of new scholarly books on sound that have appeared over the past decade. From studies of sound in a variety of social, political, and artistic settings such as Sternes The Audible Past, Emily Thompsons The Soundscape of Modernity, Karin Bijstervelds Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century, Erika Bradys A Spiral Way: How The Phonograph Changed Ethnography, and Steve Goodmans Sonic Warfare to histories and theoretical examinations of sound as an artistic practice in books by Brandon LaBelle, Alan Licht, Tara Rodgers, Frances Dyson, and perhaps most influentially, those of sound art and media scholar Douglas Kahn, sound has been truly getting its due.13 This can be no more clearly observed than in the impressive string of recent anthologiesAural Cultures, Hearing Cultures, Audio Culture, to name a fewdedicated to establishing critical archives around the cultural and social study of sound that have begun to collectively produce something close to a sound studies canon, one that is arriving just in time to meet the demands of a growing number of undergraduate and graduate courses dedicated to the subject.14 In putting this volume together, we were particularly drawn to the critical signposts offered by Michael Bull and Les Back in the introduction to their 2003 anthology The Auditory Cultures Reader, which explained that their collections focus on the auditory engaged what they called deep listening along four key vectors: sound and social experience; sound and community; sound and the spaces and places of identity and culture; sound and power, or better put, how sound makes us re-think our relation to power.15 The essays in the present collection continue these principal threads but in pushing for new models and methods of what we might call a critical American studies listening, they add a few additional vectors as well: sound and racial formation; sound and citizenship; sound technologies and subjectivities; sound and political agency. As such, we have organized the essays in this volume into three related sectionsSound Technologies and Subjectivities; Sounding Race and Gender; Sound, Citizenship and the Public Sphereall of which are meant to contribute to existing conversations within American studies

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while raising new sets of questions and concerns prompted by this renewed attention to sound, noise, music, and listening. In their essays here, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman (a co-founder of Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, the interdisciplinary soundstudiesblog.com) continues her excellent theorization of the sonic color-line by examining the use of the magnetic tape recorder as a technology of citizenship in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, Barry Shank listens to a sampled recording of African American singer Vera Hall to push at the relationship between musical beauty and political agency, and Tara Rodgers shows us how at the turn of the twentieth century metaphoric concepts of sounds as individuals coincided with the managing and ordering of social difference under industrial capitalism. When taken together, the still emerging set of inquiries, practices, and research to which the present collection aims to contribute is often understood to constitute its own field, sound studies.16 An interdisciplinary umbrella for scholars, writers, architects, engineers, and sound-makers of all stripes, sound studies has grown into a field hospitable to anyone interested in exploring sounds social meanings, cultural histories, technological evolutions, political impacts, and spatial mappings, to name only a few of the many directions being explored through this new attention to critical aurality and the practices and performances of listening. In her 2005 American Quarterly review essay, Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?, radio scholar Michelle Hilmes characterizes the field as always emerging, never emerged, while tracing its genealogy to the 1980s and another special issue on sound (in the journal Yale French Studies) edited by cinema scholar Rick Altman, who Hilmes dubs the godfather of sound studies in the United States. She finds that the books by Sterne and Thompson are not mere additions to a sound studies bookshelf, but redefine the parameters of the field altogether, less as the study of sound itself, or as practices of aurality within a particular industry or field, than of the cultural contexts out of which sound media emerged and which they in turn work to create: sound culture.17 Such a framing of the field made on the pages of an American studies journal clearly matters, but not only because of how this recent flowering of scholarship uses sound, acoustics, and aurality to provide different understandings of American culture, identity, media, technology, architecture, geography, and politics. It matters also because of just how many scholarsemerging and veteranare following the echoes of these interventions. It matters because perhaps now more than ever before in the U.S. academy, people want to talk about sound. American Quarterly special issues typically receive somewhere between 2030 submissions. After we issued a call for proposals for this special issue,

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we received over 80 papers from scholars of diverse disciplinary backgrounds. While they were from all levels of the profession, we were pleasantly surprised to see just how many of the papers were from junior scholars and doctoral candidates, a sign not only of the study of sounds quantitative currency but the promise of its future as a field of ongoing inquiry, and its importance and relevance to the future of American studies itself. While we were thrilled to see the enthusiastic response to our call, the quality of the essays we received made making decisions about what to include, and hence what to exclude, very difficult. We know that there is excellent American studies scholarship on sound in areas and on questions not represented here. We hope that future researchers will find the silences throughout these pages provocative. * Since its debut as a journal in 1949, American Quarterly has published only seven articles that deal with the study and analysis of sound in its various guises. Among them were articles on 17th century execution sermons, nineteenth century oratory, the racial politics of African American speech, and true crime radio in the 1930s and 1940s. In a 2002 article for the journal, Derek Vaillant explored the role of early radio broadcasting in the shaping of racial codes and meanings, specifically what he dubbed sounds of whiteness on independent Chicago radio stations in the 1920s and 1930s.18 Articles focusing specifically on music are more prevalent (over three dozen), though given just how crucial and central sound and music are to the construction of American identity and the history of American culture and politics, that number also seems low. In our efforts to contextualize this special issue, we were indeed surprised at just how little American Quarterly seems to have been listening over the years. In 1990, George Lipsitz noted the scholarly value of listening for sounds and voices not often heard when he called for American studies scholars to start listening beyond the fields dominant paradigms and theoretical legacies and listen closer to popular culture as a terrain of struggle, contestation, dynamic social history, and marginalized voices. Drawing on Duke Ellingtons directive to trumpet player Clark Terry that theres listening, and then theres listening, but what I want from you is to listen, Lipsitz argues for a re-conceptualization of American studies that puts critical listening to previously unheard sounds at the center of its political and intellectual project:

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A theoretically informed American Studies would begin by listening for the sounds that Toni Morrison describes, the sounds capable of breaking the back of words. These sounds cannot be summoned up by theoretical expertise alone. They cannot be constructed out of idealized subject positions emanating from reforms in discursive practices. They are to be found within the concrete contests of everyday life. Accessible by listening to what is already being said (and sung and shouted) by ordinary Americans, these sounds hold the key toward understanding the zoot suit and the Lindy-hop, and so much more. To paraphrase Ellisons narrator in Invisible Man: who knows; perhaps they speak for you.19

We decided to assemble this special issue of American Quarterly precisely to follow through on such a call. We are keenly interested in the ways that listening to sounds that might break the back of words can enable an interdisciplinary American studies in which knowledges and insights that have not been perceptible to our dominant intellectual paradigms might be heard or heard anew. We likewise decided to use this special issue of American Quarterly as an opportunity to invite and provoke American studies scholars to listen back to the fields own history of critical thinking and scholarship in order to re-evaluate the role of sound in American studies thinking. For example, we might turn to a canonical American studies text like Leo Marxs 1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America which is not known for its contributions to the critical study of sound as a set of social relations. Yet as important as descriptions of visual landscapes are in his tracking of the pastoral ideal in the work of nineteenth century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, it is actually descriptions of soundscapes that feature most prominently in the making of the pastoral ideal. Marx opens his book with Hawthorne in a Massachusetts cornfield, where he sits, looks, and listens, writing down all of the natural sounds he hearsthe repose of the sceneand all of the sounds of labor (village clocks, cowbells, and eventually locomotives) that begin to interrupt the peace and quiet of his idyllic New England soundscape. For Hawthorne, sounds are representatives of social worlds and ways of living; all sounds tell the stories of the things that make them. Marx cites Hawthorne at length:
But, hark! There is the whistle of the locomotive- the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all uniqueness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous piece. As our thoughts repose again, after this interruption, we find ourselves gazing up at the leaves and comparing their different aspect, the beautiful diversity of green20

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was similarly worried about the shrieking whistles of the locomotive, as was, perhaps most famously, Thoreau, who devoted an entire chapter of Walden to Sounds. There was the trains whistlea signal that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of townthe rattling of the cattle-train, and all of the natural sounds he praised above all else: the chanting of the whippoorwills, the wailing of the owls. Even the sounds of distant village bells become part of Thoreaus pastoral sonic ideal, their echoes vibrating the air and turning pine needles into a harp. For Marx, the sounds of the train, the sounds of the machines arriving in the garden of America, was central to his theory of the pastoral ideal. They were sounds that, he wrote, reverberate endlessly in our literature, from The Octopus and The Grapes of Wrath to The Education of Henry Adams and The Great Gatsby.21 In addition to Dewings A Listening and the writing of abolitionists, other important American studies texts and historical conjunctures in U.S. history get a hearing by the contributors to this volume. Jessica E. Teague re-sounds August Wilsons play Ma Raineys Black Bottom by focusing on what it reveals about the tension between live and recorded performances in the twentieth century. Taking Marian Anderson as exemplary, Nina Sun Eidsheim explores how the discerning listener of classical opera listens racially by subsuming perceptions and evaluations of a performers race into an assessment of her voices timbre. Eric Lott helps us to hear the social order of Jim Crow in Howlin Wolf s 1960 recording of Back Door Man, and Roshanak Kheshti shows us how the aural imaginary allows U.S. listeners of world music to construct and negotiate otherness through sound. Other essays in this issue listen back to foundational moments in American political history as a means of reconsidering sounds role in shaping and defining still contested notions of American selfhood, citizenship, and the public sphere. Lilian Radovac gives the war on noise conducted by former New York mayor LaGuardia during the 1930s a hearing and Ronda L. Sewald tunes us into the politics surrounding sound trucks in New York City in the 1920s. In her essay on contemporary immigration politics, Dolores Ins Casillas listens to the voices, sounds, and aural public spheres of U.S. Spanish language radio in order to track the central role of radio broadcasting on the sonic shaping of Mexican immigrant community and opposition to exclusionary U.S. immigration law. In their attention to crucial moments of transitions in and negotiations of notions of citizenship and the public sphere, these essays follow the lead of the late Jay Fliegelman, a prominent figure in American studies and the Coe

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Professor in the Department of American Literature at Stanford University. Though not typically thought of as a sound studies scholar, Fliegelmans 1993 Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance meticulously examined eighteenth century oratory and public speaking to argue for a new sensory understanding of early American citizenship. He reminded us that the concept of independence itself relied on acts of audible performance, acts of public declaration that linked the speaking voice in the public sphere to the definitions of subjectivity, selfhood, and individual freedoms. The text of Jeffersons Declaration of Independence was written to be spoken aloud, written with reference to the primacy of acoustic culture in eighteenth century political rhetoric (the British, it read, were deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity), and was born out of a culture of performance where sound played a vital role in political life. Or in the words of John Adams: Sound is I apprehend a more powerful instrument of moving the Passions than senseEvery passion has its distinct particular soundAn orator to gain the Art of moving the passions must attend to nature[and] adapt his own voice to the passion he would move.22 Of course, the sound that Adams spoke of and the sounds of independence and freedom that Jefferson shaped through acts of declaration were sounds that were only allowed to reverberate and echo so far. The distinct sound of American selfhood that the 18th century established was one that was likewise exclusive of African Americans, Native Americans, and women in general. If American independence was, as Fliegelman argued, declared, a performative act of audible speech, it was understood to have been declared only by and for some. If to embody American citizenship and selfhood meant to speak in an American style of elocutionary performance, then sound locked out as many from recognition as Americans as it allowed in. Americans made sounds; Blacks and Indians made noise. As listeners, the founding fathers of the 18th century were strategically hard of hearing, selective listeners who used sound to shape an exclusionary auditory politics of self, citizen, and Other. The sound of the free American, then, was built on rendering sonically incomprehensible or silent the Others that freedom refused. The Ohio abolitionist Sara G. Stanley framed it like this in 1856:
As the song of freedom verberates and reverberates through the northern hills, and the lingering symphony quivers on the still air and then sinks away into silence, a low deep wail, heavy with anguish and despair, rises from the southern plains, and the clank of chains on human limbs mingles with the mournful cadence. What to the toiling millions there, is this boasted liberty?23

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This mode of reasoning in which the sounds of the enslaved and exploited challenge the authority of the claims made about the United States in the songs of the free has long been part of the bedrock of African American political and cultural resistance and opposition. It was made urgently and oft repeated by Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, both of whom featured sound, music, and listening in their challenges to American slavery and the American racial order. The role of sound, listening, and music has been central to the work of scholars of African American history and culture, among them, Amiri Baraka, whose classic 1963 study Blues People: Negro Music in White America argued that the story of African American life is a story of sound and musican auditory sociology, a people shaped through sound. At each juncture, twist and turn, as Black people were transformed, so was their characteristic music, he wrote. It became emphatically clear to me that by analyzing the music, you could see with some accuracy what and why that change had been.24 Sound, whether organized as music or grasped in other forms, has continued to figure centrally in the more contemporary work of scholars such as Fred Moten (whose In The Break theorized sounds relationship to black aesthetic radicalism and the resistance of black objects) Alex Weheliye (whose Phonographies explored what he named sonic Afro-modernity), and Jon Cruz (whose Culture on the Margins focused on the centrality of listening and cross-racial sonic translation to the history of abolitionism).25 Indeed, as these studies highlight, sound has been a privileged epistemological and ethical mode through which black existence in the United States has been conceptualized, theorized, politicized, and constituted as an object of scholarly investigation. Given the significance of sound to knowledge produced from and about African American history and culture, it is not surprising to us that a significant number of the essays we received in response to our call for papers focused on aspects of African American existence in some way. The essays in this volume that make African American history, lives, and culture a central concern highlight the ways that a scholarly attention to sound can variously challenge, redirect, or reaffirm our understandings about many of the issues and concerns central to scholarship in American studies. The career of Marian Anderson, in particular, informs two of the essays included here. While Eidsheim centrally features Andersons operatic career, Gayle Wald sets out to critically re-hear Andersons 1939 performance on the National Mall with new ears by situating it as a reverberation with significant implications for future performances, especially for the 1972 music series held at New York Citys Lincoln Center, Soul at the Center.

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For all of the rich sonic interventions on these pages, though, one problem trailed us from the start: how to launch this special issue on sound without any sounds to listen to? While in the past American Quarterlys on-line presence has been limited in terms of its multi-media platforms, we are grateful that the journals editor Sarah Banet-Weiser was willing to work directly with the Johns Hopkins University Press to build an individual site to host many of the sounds discussed on these pages. So we recommend that as you read, click over to http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/special_issue.html, and also take a listen to this inaugural archive of the sounds (and silences and noises) of American studies.

Notes 1. www.diaspora2487.org 2. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003) 45. 3. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought (UC Press, 1994). For an example of recent work being done on the senses more broadly, see David Howes ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Berg 2005) and the journal The Senses and Society (Berg) edited by Howes, Michael Bull, Paul Gilroy, and Douglas Kahn. 4. See for example sites such as www.loc.gov/jukebox/, audioboo.fm, http://map.rapgenius.com, www. opensoundneworleans.com/, http://www.tellingstories.org/mccomb/index.html 5. Gustavus Stadler, Introduction: Breaking Sound Barriers, The Politics of Recorded Sound, Social Text 2010 28(1 102) 6. David W. Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, Thomas Porcello, Soundscapes: Toward A Sounded Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology (2010 vol. 39), 330. See also Viet Erlmann ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity (Berg, 2004); Steven Feld, Communication, Music, and Speech About Music Yearbook for Traditional Music Vol. 16 (1984); Steven Feld, Pygmy POP. A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis, Yearbook for Traditional Music Vol. 28 (1996); Steven Feld, A Rainforest Acoustemology, The Auditory Culture Reader; Steven Feld and Aaron A. Fox, Music and Language, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 23 (1994). 7. R. Murray Schafer, Open Ears, The Auditory Culture Reader, eds. Michael Bull and Les Back (Berg, 2003) 25. 8. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard, 2000) 15. 9. Mark M. Smith, Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America, Journal of The Historical Society 1(June, 2000); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996); Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford, 1998); Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996); Robert Blair St. George, Heated Speech and Literacy in Seventeenth-Century New England, in Seventeenth-Century New England ed. David D. Hall and David G. Allen (Boston, 1984). 10. Mark M. Smith, Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America, The Auditory Culture Reader 158; Mark M. Smith, Listening to the Nineteenth Century America (University of North Carolina, 2001); for a broader discussion of the impact of historical soundscape studies see Smith, Mitchell Snay, and Bruce R. Smith, Coda: Talking Sound History in Mark M. Smith ed. Hearing History: A Reader (Georgia 2004). 11. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Cornell, 2003) 2.

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12. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003) 2. 13. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 19001933 (MIT 2004); Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT 2008); Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How The Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Mississippi 2009); Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIT 2009); Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum 2006) and Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum 2010); Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Rizzoli 2007); Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke 2010); Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (UC Press 2009); Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT 2001) and Kahn and Gregory Whitehead eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (MIT 1994). 14. Mark M. Smith ed., Hearing History: A Reader (University of Georgia, 2004); Jim Drobnik ed. Aural Cultures (YYZ Books, 2004); Veit Erlmann ed., Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity (Berg, 2004); Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture (Continuum, 2006); David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus eds., The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sound, Words, and Thoughts (Wesleyan, 2001). 15 Michael Bull and Les Back, Introduction: Into Sound, The Auditory Culture Reader, 4. 16. While this volume is clearly intended as a scholarly intervention into the interdisciplinary constellation that is American Studies, it is also meant to be in dialogue with the many new works on sound recently published outside the academy. Last year the writer George Prochnik, tired of noisy New York, set off In Pursuit of Silence (Doubleday 2010), visiting monasteries, Abercrombie & Fitch stores, and bass battles only to find, like Cage, that it would be a pursuit very much in vain, Harpers contributor Garret Keizer wrote The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want (PublicAffairs 2010) which included a full chapter on Loud America, Alaskan composer and essayist John Luther Adams, in collaboration with New Yorker critic Alex Ross, outlined his approaches to composing through the sound and music of local place and environment in The Place Where You Go To Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music (Wesleyan, 2009) and leading U.K. music critic David Toop published a lyrical history of listening, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (Continuum 2010), a sensorial flip of John Bergers Ways of Seeing that found him reflecting on a wide-ranging archive that included sculptures of listeners, paintings of eavesdroppers, and literary fiction and myth that featured listening characters. In the last year alone, there were two new books on pioneering American composer and sound theorist John Cage, Kenneth Silvermans Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf 2010) and Kyle Ganns No Such Thing As Silence (Yale 2011), a meditation on his classic composition of silent performance, 433, which enjoyed its own revival last year as arguably the quietist YouTube meme ever. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0OD0EEkJdQ and http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E. 17. Michele Hilmes, Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?, American Quarterly 57.1 (2005) 249259. 18. Ronald A. Bosco, Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon, American Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer, 1978); Barnet Baskerville, 19th Century Burlesque of Oratory, American Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1968); Bette Ford, Talkin Proper, American Quarterly Vol. 50, No. 1 (Mar., 1998); Elena Razlogova, True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network Broadcasting, 19351946,American Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 2006); Derek W. Vaillant, Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 19211935, American Quarterly Vol. 54, No. 1 (Mar., 2002). 19. George Lipsitz, Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies, American Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 4 (Dec., 1990) 633. 20. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, 2000) 1314. 21. Ibid 16. 22. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford 1993) 42. 23. Robert J. Branham, Of Thee I Sing: Contesting America American Quarterly Vol. 48, Number 4 (December 1996) 632.

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24. Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Harper Perennial, 1999 edition) x. 25. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 1999); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005).

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