“The labor of tongues. Inscribed to stone. The labor of voices.” — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Slought is pleased to announce “Recitation and the Politics of Listening,” a conversation about listening and recitation as an act of political and social intervention, on Thursday, November 3, 2022 from 5:30-7pm. This program is free and open to the public, and will be held online via Zoom. Special thanks to the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania for sponsoring this event.

To recite and repeat: it carries across cultures and mediums, linking the ancient ars memoria to our digital environments of machine listening. This event brings together artist and software theorist Fabiola Hanna, artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin, comparative literature and media scholar Julie Beth Napolin, and Black feminist theorist Brittnay Proctor-Habil to discuss the implications of voice-to-text technologies and practices of recitation in filmmaking, algorithmics, and collecting/archiving. 

Recitation is usually taken to be an ideological and pedagogical practice where the subject parrots the authorities. This evening takes up a series of contrasting approaches. In her film The Cancer Journal Revisited (2018), Lin presents a chorus of voices reciting Black feminist poet Audre Lorde’s 1980 memoir of her cancer experience, listening for its activation in other bodies. As part of her digital storytelling project We Are History: A People’s History of Lebanon, Hanna has been writing software that automatically threads together individual testimonies about the contested histories of Lebanon into constructed conversations about those remembered events, and reflects on how speaking, listening, and being heard are translated into code. In Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden and other projects, Proctor-Habil collects and cares for LP records and compact discs in order to trace, as Black feminist practice, the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music in the United States post-1960. In The Fact of Resonance (2020), Napolin reflects on the politics of voice-to-text, both in its old and new media configurations, pursuing resonances between textual objects across time and space. 

Sharing excerpts of their work, they will discuss how to care for voices of the past and present, recitation activating new spaces for listening as an act of political and social intervention. Can recitation be a form political memory and care? How does recitation intersect with other forms of archival practice, from record collecting to databases?

From Lana Lin, The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). Courtesy of the artist.

Kim speaks with Julie Beth Napolin about Resonance. 

Listen to and download full episode one the High Theory site here and on Spotify, Apple, Google, and other major podcast sites. And here’s a short preview…

Julie Beth’s book The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) explores resonance and sound in modern literature. In the episode she references Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening (Fordham UP, 2007), Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music (Shambala Publications, 1996), the music of Toru Takemitsu, and Damo Suzuki´s “sound carriers.” In our longer conversation she talked about Naomi Waltham-Smith’s new book, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021).

A sonic ensemble, this essay describes how the COVID-19 pandemic cleared the way for heightened protest against racial violence. Both the pandemic and Black Lives Matter address the acoustical threshold between the inside and outside, being a call to listen rather than simply to hear. Arguing that the call exceeds the confines of the first-person subject, particularly in its chants for justice, the essay moves through auditory fragments of pandemic and protest. These fragments are connected through the fact of air, breathe, and the recognition of a shared world and its chorus.

Part of a special issue of Sociologica, “Listening in a Time of Pandemic,” edited by Naomi Waltham-Smith and Jessica Feldman. With thanks to my friend and interlocutor, David Copenhafer, and to Ester Cois of Sociologica.

And at times when/ only the void stood between us we got/ all the way to each other – Paul Celan

To be published by Fordham UP on May 3, 2020. Available for preorder here.

The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which anglophone and francophone narrative and novel theory developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative and novel theory have been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustic questions “who hears?” and “who listens?”

The representation of acoustical phenomena in literary fiction involves a politics of listening that inheres within the unheard (yet written) sounds resonating through the work of Joseph Conrad. Methodologically, Napolin captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustic unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. As theorized across these pages, “resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Conrad to his interlocutors– Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman– the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music. A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

A new essay on the Wooster Group’s “The B-Side: ‘Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,’ a Record Album Interpretation.” Thank you to Eric Berryman, Kate Valk, Bruce Jackson, Social Text, and the Black Sound and the Archive Working Group at Whitney Humanities Center.

“THE B-SIDE is based on the 1965 LP ‘Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,’ which features work songs, blues, spirituals, preaching, and toasts from inmates in Texas’ then-segregated agricultural prison farms. The album was brought to The Wooster Group by performer Eric Berryman after he saw the Group’s previous record album interpretation EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS. In THE B-SIDE, Berryman plays the album and transmits the material live, by channeling, via an in-ear receiver, the voices of the men on the record. Accompanying him are Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore. Berryman also provides context from the book Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues by Bruce Jackson, the folklorist who recorded the album at the prison in 1964 and is now a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo.” http://www.thewoostergroup.org

Elektra, 1965

I’m pleased to present a new work. “Pneumatic Memory: Listening to Listening in ‘The B-Side'”

Friday, February 8, 8:45am-5:30pm, Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall
All-day BSAW Symposium

Roundtable Presenters & Featured Speakers:

Lara Cohen (Swarthmore)
Michael Denning (Yale)
Nina Eidsheim (UCLA)
Vijay Iyer (Harvard)
Roshanak Kheshti (UCSD)
Carter Mathes (Rutgers)
Julie Beth Napolin (The New School)
Marti Newland (Harry T. Burleigh Society)
Mendi Obadike (Pratt Institute)
Imani Owens (Univ. of Pittsburgh)
Brittnay Proctor (College of Wooster)
Anthony Reed (Yale)
Sonnet Retman (Univ. of Washington)
Wadada Leo Smith (Musician)
Gustavus Stadler (Haverford College)
Jennifer Stoever (SUNY Binghamton)
Sherrie Tucker (Univ. of Kansas)
Alexandra T. Vazquez (NYU)
Michael Veal (Yale)
Gayle Wald (George Washington Univ.)

Thank you to Daphne Brooks and Brian Kane for organizing. For more information, visit http://blacksound.yale.edu/amazing-grace-and-bsaw-symposium/