Register
Register here for the annual meeting and to begin or renew an ASA membership
Register here to submit a proposal through the ASA's 2012 submission site.
Register here for JHU Press and ASA membership services, including online access to American Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.Register here to join an ASA community. Only current ASA members may contribute to the community blogs. Registration is not required to submit display or text ads or news and events or to view many pages. We will refuse posts that are not of professional interest to ASA members.
Click here for membership FAQ's
Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer Lynn. "The Contours of the Sonic Color-line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening," Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, August 2007. Advisor: Carla Kaplan
The Contours of the Sonic Color-line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening, is a literary, historical, and theoretical examination of the ways in which sound and listening functioned to produce social and racial difference during two significant, interconnected moments in American racial formation: late antebellum slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and the late Jim Crow era in the mid-twentieth. The literary and aural texts I examine—slave narratives and social realist works—explicitly responded to and intervened in racial discourse during these periods, representing the uneven power dynamics of U.S. white supremacy in order to dismantle them. In Contours, I argue that two of the most powerful dimensions of these counternarratives of race have heretofore been overlooked: the way in which they represent racism as operating in multiple sensory modalities—especially sound—as well as their use of aural imagery to challenge the dominance of visual discourses of race stemming from the Enlightenment. The notion of the visible color-line, made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois, is imbricated with its aural echo, what I term the “sonic color-line.”
Through theoretical analysis, close reading, and archival research, I reveal the “sonic color-line” in American culture, an interpretive site where racial difference is produced and policed through the ear. To examine its historical presence, I focus my inquiry on textual soundscapes—the acoustic spaces created by representations of ambient sound, music, speech, and noise—and depictions of listening within a range of African-American cultural production from Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Folkways recording artist Tony Schwartz. Through contextualized “close listenings,” I show how the macropolitics of race and gender become powerful lived historical experiences through the intimate, micro-world of the senses. Just as we have a gaze that is filtered through our subjective lens(es), so too do we have what I call a “listening ear” that is historically embodied and culturally contextual. Far from being vision’s binary opposite, sound frequently appears to be visuality’s doppelganger—its unacknowledged but ever-present “other”—in the construction of race and the performance of racial oppression.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]