SHUM 4851 - Listening to Race in US Culture

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 4751, ASRC 4851, ENGL 4078, GOVT 4553)

Fall. 4 credits.

Limited to 15 students.

J. Stoever-Ackerman.

Conventional wisdom and previous scholarship have led us to believe that race is a visual phenomenon. This seminar unsettles the longstanding relationship between race and looking by exploring the often-undetected ways in which sound and listening have also functioned to produce race in the United States. Just as W.E.B. Du Bois delineated the dangers of the visual color-line, our mutual critical labors will reveal race’s audible contour, the sonic color-line, and examine how race can be heard as well as seen. The seminar is both an investigation of the role of sound in the historical production of race as well as an interdisciplinary introduction designed to open our ears to the field of sound studies from multiple vantage points: historical, textual, technological, and material.