Sounding the Americas: The Politics and Aesthetics of Racialised Acoustics

Abstract

In this essay I consider the politics and aesthetics of racialised acoustics throughout the Americas through debates generated by two recent innovative books in Latin American and Caribbean sound studies, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and The New Neighborhood of the Americas by Tom McEnaney and Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place by Dylon Lamar Robbins. These two books take interdisciplinary, transhistorical, multilingual, and transnational approaches to sound technologies and the politics and aesthetics of mediated voices. In their work, we see the relationship between sound technologies, white or whitening political and aesthetic hegemonies, and formative practices that resist, interfere with, and transform these hegemonies across what McEnaney refers to as the “sonic color line.”

Keywords:

• race and ethnicity
• sound studies
• populism

Aimé Césaire would open the literary magazine Tropiques that he co-edited from 1941 to 1945 with a poetic exercise in listening. As the opening of his editorial-poem reads: “A silent and sterile land. I am speaking about ours. And my hearing measures by the Caribbean the terrifying silence of Man” (Césaire 1941, 5).¹ It is highly unlikely that 1941 Fort-de-France, Martinique, where Césaire wrote and printed this text would have been at all silent. Césaire’s hyperbole participates, however, in a hemispheric genealogy of interrogating the dynamic imbrication of the technologies that mediated sound (including the radio and the phonograph), agency, and power. What Césaire poeticises across the Caribbean, in the middle of World War II, on an island ruled by the Nazi-supporting Vichy regime after France and its empire’s capture by Germany, is not a total silence. Rather, Césaire marks the real inaudibility of universal “man,” capitalised. This idea of silence marks the otherwise unvoiced distance, both actual and symbolic, between imperial Europe and a Caribbean outpost of empire. As Césaire (1955/2001) would go on to explain it in his famous 1955 Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism], Nazism was part of a continuum of violence that extended through the record of slavery and colonialism. In the 1941 editorial-poem, Césaire goes on to juxtapose the silence of capitalised “man” with the sounds made by uncapitalised, particular “man.” What he thereby indicates is the gap between the mediated voice of imperial power that represents itself as if it were universal and the listening necessary to construct a solidary plurality of the resistant sounds of particular humans.

In this essay I consider the politics and aesthetics of racialised acoustics throughout the Americas through debates generated by two recent innovative books in Latin American and Caribbean sound studies, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and The New Neighborhood of the Americas by Tom McEnaney (2017) and Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place by Dylon Lamar Robbins (2019). These two books take interdisciplinary, transhistorical, multilingual, and transnational approaches to sound technologies and the politics and aesthetics of mediated voices. I locate my dialogue with these two books as that of an eager and intrigued outsider to sound studies who is grounded in a comparative approach to Caribbean literature, history, and social theory.

My interest in sound studies grows out of a fascinating talk I attended in 2018 by Alejandra Bronfman (2016) in which she dialogued with theories of reading to conceptually ground the practice of radio listening in the Caribbean. Her talk drew on McEnaney’s work and my subsequent reading of her work with McEnaney’s informed the theoretical framework I was developing for understanding Caribbean literary magazines as located mediums. As a result, I was excited about Robbins’s book, which in turn dialogues with both Bronfman and McEnaney. Bronfman’s book, Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean, articulates the critical framework through which my dialogue with McEnaney and Robbins proceeds. As she indicates in reference to Caribbean space, “Once assembled, voices and machines circulated within economies of desire and belonging that ignored national boundaries even as they reproduced or generated new social and racial inequalities” (2016, 7). She indicates here what both McEnaney and Robbins reinforce: that the study of sound technologies and mediated voices in the production of racialised power dynamics demands a transnational approach that mirrors the border crossing work of sound technologies. In their work, we see the relationship between sound technologies, white or whitening political and aesthetic hegemonies, and formative practices that resist, interfere with, and transform these hegemonies across what McEnaney refers to as the “sonic color line” (150).

In Acoustic Properties Tom McEnaney’s primary objects of inquiry are radio and literary explorations of voice extending across the Americas in chapters focussed on the United States, Cuba, and Argentina. His work moves between the 1920s and the 1980s, beginning with the first commercial transnational radio broadcast from Argentina (1923) and ending with an analysis of Ricardo Piglia’s novel The Absent City (1992). McEnaney thus traces for us the way that “radio and the novel coevolved” (2017, 9). The relationship between radio and voice become central to the book’s analysis, which is rooted in populist politics and questions of racial and gendered difference germane to the presumed univocality of populism. The book traces the coevolution of radio and narrative in relation to “three paradigms of populist political power in the midcentury Americas”: those led by FDR in the United States, Perón in Argentina, and Castro in Cuba (8). Radio was key to these paradigms of power and the novels that dialogued with them, McEnaney suggests, “because it offered new modes to manage the problem of populist political speech: to speak for the people or to be spoken through by the people” (ibid.). The book repeatedly opens up this problem at the heart of populist discourse in its examination of narrative aesthetics that (critically) mimic and counter the (often white) hegemonic voice of the radio.

Acoustic Properties highlights the necessarily transnational space of the radio, a space that “was often also a neocolonial or imperial space, although it could be an anticolonial force” (11). The medium of the radio, as “object, infrastructure, and a set of cultural practices,” could reinforce or counter the work of empire and coloniality (4). As McEnaney also argues, this medium contributed to the construction of a “new neighborhood of the Americas”, the model he offers as a related alternative to “good neighbor” policies of the United States that purported to soften the force of its imperial relationship to Latin America and the Caribbean (2017, 11–12). The “new neighborhood of the Americas” describes instead “the new models of geopolitical and cultural relation that developed through radio in the Americas from 1930s to the 1960s” (McEnaney 2017, 11). This transnational model of understanding radio counters the preponderance of Benedict Anderson’s influence in radio history, for instead of contributing to understanding the national imaginary fomented by the radio, it suggests instead that the radio is “the transnational medium par excellence” (McEnaney 2017, 10).

McEnaney is right to indicate that the aural politics and aesthetics of “voice” are crucial to populism. In the intellectual genealogy of socialist-populist aesthetic theory in Latin America sources abound for the idea that to give “voice” to “the people” is a primary function of art. One of the most influential texts of this history of ideas is Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s essay, “El socialismo y el hombre nuevo” [Socialism and the new man], which asserts that Cuban intellectuals could not yet sing to the tune of “the authentic voice of the people,” an ability left to the ‘New Man’ that socialism would construct (Guevara 1967/1982, 14). In this pronouncement, Guevara reinforces the populist aesthetic theory that art should represent the vox populi, but he also – and importantly – suggests the impossibility of achieving this goal under the persistence of a capitalist economic system – even 8 years after the 1959 revolution in Cuba. The tension between the persistence of a populist theory of art and Guevara’s reluctance to concede the possibility of its realisation falls directly into the line of argument that McEnaney’s book offers.

In his examination of the aesthetic and political problem of “a popular voice” throughout the Americas, McEnaney constructs an interdisciplinary theory he calls “narrative acoustics” (7). As he elaborates the role of acoustics in his book, “acoustic properties (…) refers to both sound’s long resistance to property and those sonic qualities that challenge possessive ownership of one’s voice” (McEnaney 2017, 17). The very notion of a popular voice along with what we might call the “voice of the radio” undercuts the possessive ownership of voice and brings up key problems, such as: how, to what end, and by whom is a popular voice constructed? How is such a voice racialised, gendered, and classed? What are the political and aesthetic consequences of univocality in public discourse and art? Another way of posing the same problem that is germane to the medium of the radio in this work is: how is a popular voice mediated?

As Robert Whitney describes populist discourse, it “functioned to construct ‘the people’ out of fragmented and scattered populations” (2001, 16). In other words, rather than accept, as Guevara and many other proponents of populist aesthetics have, that “a” popular voice exists in the world, Whitney indicates the constructive function of populist representation in both politics and aesthetics. Gillian McGillivray has noted what McEnaney’s examples across the hemisphere also attest to: that populism resounded throughout the Americas in an ideological matrix that “elevated the moral virtue of ‘the common people (populus)’ over the political elite [and] ‘producers’ or ‘labor’ over capitalists as the source of progress” (2009, 7). While there are many good political and aesthetic reasons – past, present, and future – for prioritising labour and workers over capital and capitalists, there is also a longstanding understanding that what Audre Lorde (2019) has called “the institutionalized rejection of difference” can have devastating consequences of political and aesthetic dimensions (108). In short, “labour” and “the worker” have never been a univocal, singular figure unshaped by differences of race, gender, and even class, to name just a few.

McEnaney’s work on John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, and Robert F. Williams in particular demonstrates an exciting array of analyses that shed significant light on the racialised aesthetics and politics of the mediated popular voice. The chapter on Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy sets the stage for the problem in its examination of the peculiar univocality written into Dos Passos’s series of novels. As McEnaney explains this phenomenon in the series of novels, “Dos Passos creates the people’s voice by narrating every individual as if he or she were the instantiation of the public” (49).² Radio emerges in this analysis as central to both producing and understanding both the conformation of a public and the aural mediation of such a public as representative of “the people.” McEnaney’s analysis also indicates how difficult it may be to read the political consequences of Dos Passos’s aesthetic choice to instantiate a popular voice (33). Whereas some critics have read the novels as hegemonic reproducers of the culture industry, McEnaney sides with Sartre’s contention that they “impel us to revolt” with the flatness of their tone (45). One may read between the lines that the dullness of univocality recalls the flat tone that covers up the violence of populism as the register of state power.

In the book’s analysis of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel, Lawd Today!, it becomes abundantly clear that the flatness of tone through which Dos Passos imitates the radio’s production of a popular voice is also racialised as white. As McEnaney explains, “What was the ‘speech of the people’ in Dos Passos sounds only like the voice of white power in Wright’s fiction” (82). The “people’s speech” represented by the radio and ventriloquised in Dos Passos is thus both flat and hegemonically white, and although gender is less germane to the analysis in this part of the book, this voice is also necessarily masculine. This phenomenon should come as no surprise from the present perspective of the US where the working class is still overwhelmingly represented as white and male. Overrepresenting the voices of Eurodescendent men, as representative of the people, is as much a trope of hemispheric America as it is of the US.

Acoustic Properties further makes the case for the dominantly white racialisation of radio acoustics in the US as well as the importance of radio for establishing an aural hemispheric “neighbourhood” in its analysis of the radio show Radio Free Dixie. This show spearheaded by African American political activist Robert F. Williams was broadcast to the US from Havana during the 1960s. The show coincided with US-Cuban radio wars consisting of transnational broadcasts and interferences, in which, in McEnaney’s analysis “conquering a signal with noise, or the noise with a clear signal came to index political power” (145). In this context, Williams’s broadcast of a show from Cuba and to the US that would call for “an African American revolution in the United States and (…) provide a musical soundtrack to the ongoing civil rights movement” would have great material and symbolic power (McEnaney 2017, 147). On the one hand, the show’s locus of enunciation would be key to the move. A small island in a post-imperial relationship to the US provided the infrastructure to take on its structuring white supremacy and emitting a call for freedom. The same small country defeated the US at its failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs/Playa Girón in 1961 and threatened the US with its holding of a Soviet nuclear weapon in 1962. Implicitly, Williams’s show from Cuba bolstered Cuba’s role as a threat to the stability of the status quo in the US. The show also intervened in the white vox populi of the radio network that Dos Passos had reproduced and Wright had critiqued. Williams described the show himself in an ad published in his North Carolina-based periodical Crusader as “the first completely free radio voice that black people have had to air their case against brutal racial oppression” (148). The effect, as McEnaney surmises, was that “Williams effectively altered the soundscape in the United States, changing what could and could not be said, as he framed his musical content with political speeches so that each reverberated in the other” (150). Whereas radio as the mediator of a hegemonic (white man’s) voice of the people is far from a utopian ideal, the transnational possibilities it has afforded across lines of race and empire also facilitated memorable interventions like Williams’s.

This show was an important node in the network of connections between Black Radical artists and activists the United States and the Cuban Revolution, also examined in works by Cynthia Young (2006), Besenia Rodríguez (2005), and Devyn Spence Benson (2016). This network is complicated by the Cuban state’s nationalising the history of Black solidarity between the US and Cuba. After 1959, as Benson (2016) explains this phenomenon, “The new government nationalized historic diasporic alliances and transferred local antidiscrimination debates into a national rhetoric against imperialism, colonialism, and racism” (153). The national voicing of these moves would have consequences internally that resonate with the problems – and structural violence – of representing a vox populi.

In Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place (2019), Dylon Lamar Robbins is concerned in particular with how listening for racialisation interacts with other senses, and vision especially. Tracing case studies from the late nineteenth century in Brazil to the 1960s in Cuba, his book suggests an audio-visual framework for understanding the history of coding – and decoding – racial ideologies in relation to place-making in the Americas. “The sonic sensibility of place” emerges as one of the primary objects of inquiry in the book, and as he explains this notion, “place is not just a strictly geographical or political notion, but also a sensorial one, and (…) sensorial organization is essential to tracing the roles of sound in racialization processes” (Robbins 2019, 20). Of course, processes – and sounds – of racialisation have many possible sources and consequences. Robbins suggests that his book offers on the one hand a sound map of “Afro-America,” and on the other hand he describes the plurivocality of the archive he examines in his book as “diffuse evidence of scenes of listening, of events, of places and of listening in the service of place-making in the shadow of empire and in the key of coloniality” (21–22). In other words, Robbins’s book appears to interrogate the centrality of real and imagined Black acoustics – in music and speech – to the construction of national imaginaries in Brazil and Cuba at the same time that it traces the hegemonic work seeking to contain and control Afro-diasporic music and voices between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both countries.

Robbins’s opening reading of the composer Gottschalk’s concert in Brazil in the late nineteenth century sets the stage for a long tension in Brazil and Cuba between showcasing and repressing the circulation of African music and speech. He notes that the West and Central African musical elements of Gottschalk’s work were left out of the newspaper review covering the concert and suggests, “Perhaps they were sounds whose omission would have been necessary to impart the projected ‘racelessness’ of the modernity being showcased” (Robbins 2019, 4). This reading sets up the book’s primary intervention into the role of hearing and silencing the sounds of race-making and how they run up against – and sometimes through – the aims of hegemonic actors to undermine, dissimulate, repress, and appropriate Afrodescendent peoples and their cultural productions throughout Latin America. Alejo Carpentier’s participation in battles of music criticism during the Cuban 1930s and 1940s over the use of African instruments and polyrhythms in orchestral music certainly attests to the continuity of this tension in the history of Cuban music.³ It takes great historical imagination to enter these musical debates – consisting of both arguments and omissions – for today, the prefix “Afro-” is implied when one describes much of the music that is Brazilian and Cuban, pace the attempt to cloak Black aesthetics in the global circulation of music and dance from Latin America as “Latin”. As Robbins’s work instructs us, however, this interpretive regime is neither exclusively visual nor sonic – even as the music is billed as “Latin,” Afro-American traditions are necessarily audible as formatively central to it.

Music as representative of the nation in Robbins’s book would have a similar function to the idea of a “popular voice” that is so generative in McEnaney’s book. As Robbins demonstrates in the conversation he stages between Carpentier and Mário de Andrade from Brazil (both highly influential fiction writers and music critics), Andrade conceptualised music as a generator of national identity in Brazil. We see Andrade push against music dominated by any one ethnic aesthetic and advocate instead for Brazilian music that incorporates European, African, and Indigenous traditions in order to express the racial composition of the nation (Robbins 2019, 170). Andrade himself would suggest: “A national art is not made with a discretionary and dilettantish choice of elements: a national art is already made in the unconsciousness of the people. Brazilian popular music is our race’s strongest, most complete and most totally national creation so far” (Robbins 2019, 169). In his reading, popular music stands in for the popular voice of the nation, and race is defined conterminously with nation. The aesthetic function of music in this framework is subordinated to the politicised mediation of a multiracial national ethos.

The question of representing a popular voice recurs in Robbins’s examination of debates about the racial character of Cuban speech. In his work on this topic, he implicitly ties these debates to the technology of the phonograph in conversation with Michael Taussig (1993) and Rachel Price (2014). As we see the radio doing in McEnaney’s work, in Robbins’s work we see the phonograph emitting a hegemonic voice of “mastery.” As he explains with regard to the phonograph, “It was a machine, in this context, that constituted a technologization of speech, and therefore, as a conduit for isolating and objectifying the voice. And in a context with lingering residues of slavocracy, this ‘master’s voice’ could speak so much more than the reproduction of sound; it could speak to the racial politics of speech, to the assumed ownership of a language, and to the absorption and muting of other voices in a campaign of defining and fashioning a national language ‘cleansed’ of any ‘African’ influence, and therefore, an audible map of whiteness” (88). Robbins appears to suggest that the phonograph thus conceptually mediates rather than infrastructurally participates in attempts to contain and whiten the racial identity of Cuban speech.

Of course, despite hegemonic arguments to the contrary, the African influences of Cuban speech across the racial spectrum are as undeniable as the African legacies of Cuban music. In a speculative turn of his analysis Robbins imagines how the enslaving elites in Cuba would have listened to the soundscape of spoken Spanish as it was transformed by African languages in the plantation colony of the nineteenth century: “The sound of this was arguably the sound of a society that was not entirely their own, and one that echoed, as it were, in the ‘Africanization’ of their language, the end of their class’ reign, the end of the regime of labor and property that sustained their wealth, the possibility that is, of another Haiti. That paranoid ear for difference in the sounds of speech was finely tuned to placing the voices it heard” (92). Although Robbins speculates from the perspective of the paranoid hegemonic ear listening for the loss of power in a transformed language, this passage, along with the multiple examples of racist and racialising listening that he goes on to provide, connote the potent Africanisation of Spanish that nonetheless vanquished Cuban Spanish. In fact, Cuban Spanish along with the Spanish spoken throughout the Caribbean region is often derided with coded language for anti-Blackness or simply considered unintelligible compared to other parts of the Spanish-speaking hemisphere. In Robbins’s analysis of the debates over the racial character of Cuban speech we can hear how the voice of power and the sound of the nation themselves have been transformed by African idioms.

Césaire’s editorial-poem that begins by identifying a distinction between a missing universal voice and the audibility of particular human sounds ends by articulating the voice of a “we” resisting the Shadow of fascism: “Pourtant nous sommes de ceux qui disent non à l’ombre” [But we are among those who say no to the shadow]. But Césaire adds ominously, “L’Ombre gagne …” [the Shadow is winning] (1941, 6). Tropiques would become the medium that would facilitate this voice that cannot fill the void of a universal, but it would not be a sufficiently powerful medium to replace hegemonic power. In the meantime, it would function like the noise, understood as “interference and disruption,” that interrupts the signal of colonial power (Robbins 2019, 214).

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Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann is an Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College. Her first book, Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press (expected 2021). Her essays also appear in MLN, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Inti. She co-edited with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel a Special Section called “Con-Federating the Caribbean” of Small Axe (2020), and with Clement White she co-edited a Special Issue on Nicolás Guillén of the C. L. R. James Journal (2015). She is also the translator of Spinning Mill (Cardboard House Press, 2019), a collection of poems by contemporary Cuban author Legna Rodríguez Iglesias.

Notes

1 As I argue elsewhere, instead of proclaiming an editorial project, the piece performs this highly influential literary magazine’s antifascist, anticolonial, and indubitably poetic project of fomenting resistant Black consciousness (Seligmann 2016; Seligmann 2021)

2 The equation in this analysis between “the people’s voice” and “the public” indicates that the problem with a “popular voice” is necessarily implicated in theories of the “public sphere.”

3 Robbins also references Carpentier’s advocacy for the centrality of a black aesthetics to Cuban music (23).