"That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It": Hearing Blackness

"That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It":Hearing Blackness Kristin Moriah (bio) Listening to Black culture and Black music is so ubiquitous that the act of listening to Blackness can seem facile and its nuances can go unnoticed. But listening to Blackness entails forms of critical apprehension that carry different valences across different frequencies. "Listen" can be a command, an invocation, or a plea. In progressive political discourses about anti-racism and anti-Blackness, we are asked to listen for sounds that go unnoticed by others; to listen for dissonance; to listen to music; to listen to protest; to listen for signs of life. And yet, there is still so much to be said about Black sonic phenomena, like the way "I Can't Breathe," Eric Garner's last words, are now the title of an R&B song and a protest chant. Thus, the complex and shifting meaning of Black sounds and occasions to listen to Black culture pose significant critical challenges. At the same time, the misapprehension of Black sounds and sonic forms carries profound consequences and can contribute to enduring forms of subjection. Here, I am thinking of the way Matthew Morrison uses the term "Blacksound" to refer to "the legacies, sounds, and movements of African American bodies—both real and imagined—on which blackface performance and popular entertainment was based" (18) and finds copious examples of Blacksound in the present. Or the way Jennifer Stoever argues that beginning in the nineteenth century, racist listening practices offered [End Page 291] "white elites a new method of grounding racial abjection in the body while cultivating white listening practices as critical, discerning, delicate and, above all, as the standard of citizenship and personhood (5). Following Kevin Quashie, given that being "heard" can also be fraught with danger, and that certain aspects of Black vernacular culture flourish outside of the range of dominant culture, I am struck by the way inaudibility, or sonic inscrutability, emerges as a significant aspect of Black sounding worlds and Black literature, where listening is often related to the struggle to sound or to be heard correctly, even while retaining autonomy and privacy. I note that the struggle to sound publicly, and to be perceived accurately, forms the bedrock of Black literature in North America and creates a bridge to literature across the Black diaspora. It might feel like a digression, but I hope that an anecdote about the insistence upon the importance of being heard taken from Black print culture will ground my argument and smooth the way here. As Sylvia Wynter says, "we are a storytelling species" (McKittrick 9). And you are, by extension, my listeners. In spring 1848 the Frederick Douglass' Paper entered a literary fray and marshalled the power of listening to argue for the cultural relevance of anti-slavery lyrics and verse. In an unsigned editorial, preeminent American literary critic Rufus W. Griswold was excoriated for not including abolitionist poetry in The Poets and Poetry of America (1842), an anthology of American poetry that was one of the earliest and most important of its kind. Griswold's nationalist literary project would help to define American literature and culture for years to come. According to Albert D. Pionke, "as a nation, Griswold's United States accrued intellectual status by virtue of counting among its citizens … a diversely talented ensemble of critics, publishers, and writers" (320). Frederick Douglass's interlocutors were well aware of the importance of Griswold's anthology and of the implications of their exclusion. But perhaps even more fascinating than their conviction that abolitionist verses were foundational to American national literary projects was the recourse to sound in their very appeal to Griswold and his like. The editorial provides us with an opportunity to consider the politics of listening and hearing and how they have been marshalled by Black writers in North America. And so, the Frederick Douglass' Paper writers bemoan the notable absence of even one "line of good anti-slavery song; for be it known to the lovers of good songs, that some of the best ever sung, are those to be heard in the happy homes of abolitionists, and our great anti-slavery gatherings." The editorial...

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