How has race been “instrumentalized” throughout sonic modernity, and what has it been instrumentalized in service of? And how have Black diasporic writers, artists, and performers, resisted processes of instrumentalization, while simultaneously mobilizing the aesthetic devices of noise and sound to do so—using “the masters tools to dismantle the masters house,” so to speak, to borrow from Audre Lorde? In this course, we begin to answer these very questions by orienting our gaze towards various genres of non-canonical Black sound and its manifestations in Black diasporic literature and performance, representations of “noise” and indeterminacy in the visual and poetic field, and philosophical precepts and questions about Blackness’ instrumentality in Black Studies from theorists spanning Frank B. Wilderson, Calvin Warren, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Alexander Weheliye, Daphne Brooks, and Fred Moten. Bringing into focus texts and disciplinary debates around Aunt Hester’s scream in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of a Life, lynching phonographies, contemporary genres and experiments in non-canonical Black music (such as Classical, electronic, and avant-garde repertoires), sound and assemblage poetry, as well as media ecologies of telecommunications infrastructure on the African continent, we will begin to conceive of provisional answers to these questions about sonic modernity and instrumentality in Black diasporic literature and performance from the 19th century to present.
