Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

by Alexander G. Weheliye

Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman. Highlighting how black authors, filmmakers, and musicians have actively engaged with recorded sound in their work, Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture, of what he terms “sonic Afro-modernity.” He shows that by separating music and speech from their human sources, sound-recording technologies beginning with the phonograph generated new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. Black artists used these new possibilities to revamp key notions of modernity—among these, ideas of subjectivity, temporality, and community. Phonographies is a powerful argument that sound technologies are integral to black culture, which is, in turn, fundamental to Western modernity. Weheliye surveys literature, film, and music to focus on engagements with recorded sound. He offers substantial new readings of canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, establishing dialogues between these writers and popular music and film ranging from Louis Armstrong’s voice to DJ mixing techniques to Darnell Martin’s 1994 movie I Like It Like That . Looking at how questions of diasporic belonging are articulated in contemporary black musical practices, Weheliye analyzes three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical the Haitian and African American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and black British artist Tricky and his partner Martina. Phonographies imagines the African diaspora as a virtual sounding space, one that is marked, in the twentieth century and twenty-first, by the circulation of culture via technological reproductions—records and tapes, dubbing and mixing, and more.

Genres: Music, Theory, Race, History, Cultural Studies

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 2005

About the author

Alexander G. Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.

Reviews

[lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tried reading this last year and struggled/couldnt finish… I had to come back to it for exams and luckily i had a much better experience

[Cana McGhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

sets out to figure out how Black modernity sounds by paying attention to technological/social histories of sound interface w/ Black cultural production. intertwining literary analysis w/ discussion of musical objects, with a focus on lyrics and text rather than the soundings themselves (speaking to Weheliye's training). this lost a bit of steam as i kept reading, as the early chapter on du bois and remixing was probably the strongest chapter. mixed bag for me.

[India · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't really finish...very dense and sort of hard to read

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant dissection of the relationship between sound technologies and Afro-modernity.

[Osvaldo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half stars, really.

(I need a macro for that).

Wehilye's insights are indispensable, but more than once I found he relied too heavily on the visual for what is supposed to be about the sonic. This is most clearly the case in his penultimate chapter where he writes more about the Fugees' videos than their actual musical and sonic content. But still, an examination of the Fugee's taking on the role of "refugee/immigrant" through the lens of Kristeva's theorization of the abject is fucking academically titillating (and I mean that in a positive way).

I also love his challenge to theorizing the sonic and popular through his recognition of the limits of that kind of approach as ultimately seeking to "rescue" the popular and recuperate it into the "proper place" instead of consider how they interpenetrate each other. Though I am not convinced that his assertion of "thinking through sound rather than thinking about sound with the help of critical theory" (203) has any real meaning outside of it looking good on paper - but perhaps I only think that because I simply have trouble conceptualizing it as an approach.

[Yejin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alex Weheliye successfully disturbs and ruptures the carefully constructed dichotomies of modernity/afro-modernity, universalism/particularities, and authenticity/commodification through afro-sonic understandings of history.