In 1929, the “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith made her only known film appearance in a short, two-reel film by Dudley Murphy, St. Louis Blues, titled after the W.C. Handy song that Smith had made famous. One prefiguration of the music video medium, it was the first film to be made to a preexisting song. Sixty years later, the song moves into a third instantiation when Isaac Julien returns to a fragment of Smith’s film performance in his dreamy Looking for Langston. It situates Smith in the context of Black queer literary voicings and media history more generally, thus assuring a primary place for Smith in the history and theory of film. Taken together, these films acousmatic voices provide the material for an aesthetic theory of Black queer film as an ongoing, questioning encounter between sound and image, one where the otherworldly takes precedence over realism.
The chapter takes up Du Bois as a contemporary of Conrad and Freud, but one who was listening to memory, song, race, and the unconscious in ways that they could not. It reads Du Bois as a theorist of sound through his strategies of resonance, asking how music, for Du Bois, is a sonic trace of slavery. Using musicology and archival documents, the reading is an intensive engagement with the aurality of Du Bois’s strategies of composition, including musical notion and collage. Ultimately, the reading recuperates gender and the feminine at the heart of The Souls of Black Folk as a work of listening and mourning.
Chapter One is a study of Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and it concentrates on the first two words of the novel, neither of which are in English. The chapter approaches the novel through the filters of these words’ racial and colonial sound effects, which become a basis for reappraising canonical tropes of voice in narrative theory, media theory, and the phenomenology of reading. Conrad’s novelistic writing becomes critical when read in relation to emergent sound technologies, the phonograph and ethnography, both of which simultaneously depended on the oral while superseding it through a different mode of technological mediation. But the novel, as a form, only becomes a “modern” technology of voice in its discovery of free indirect discourse, which is premised upon an exclusion of the colonial sonic traces of sexual violence. The chapter concludes with Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Conrad using lip-sync as a postcolonial strategy.
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