Читать книгу The Sonic Color Line - Jennifer Lynn Stoever - Страница 8

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Can you sing out in the pouring rain? / Can you sing out, can you sing out?”

—Fishbone, “Pouring Rain”

In summer 2015, I was honored to thank Norwood Fisher and Angelo Moore of Fishbone in person for being my first, funkiest, and fiercest critical race theorists. Only because music is so very powerful do people create mechanisms like the sonic color line to contain it.

To my RUSD English teachers Kathy Rossi, Keith Lloyd, Katie Mackey, and Richard McNeil, who taught us public school kids how to think and write with a love and rigor that turned many of us toward futures we thought far beyond our reach. Thank you to art teachers Louis Fox and Italo DiMarco, for showing me to myself.

I have boundless love for my Riverside home folks: George Campos, Kim Earhart, Cara Cardinale Fidler, Kelly Herrera, Nova Punongbayan, Rodrigo Ramos, Joe Spagna, and especially my dearest familia—Julia Martinez, Sarah Parry, Karin Ribaudo, Jeff Ribaudo, Alison Sumner, Maria Unzueta-Hernandez, and last but certainly not least, Karen Tongson. Womb to tomb, birth to earth. Thank you to Juan and Alice and the Contreras-Martinez families, who helped raise me to be the woman I am today. The generosity and personal example of the Honorable Joe Hernandez II and Gloria Lopez sustained me through graduate school. Melissa Contreras-McGavin and Bradley McGavin, you are the wind beneath my wings.

I was fortunate to have a top-notch, affordable undergraduate education at UC Riverside. I first “heard” literature in Katherine Kinney’s class; I still dream of delivering readings as on point as hers. I also benefitted from the brilliance and generosity of Emory Eliot—gone too soon—Carlos Cortés, Jennifer Doyle, John Ganim, George Haggerty, Tiffany Ana López, Peter Mileur (now my Binghamton colleague), Venetria K. Patton, and Margie Waller. Kevin Imamura remains a lifelong friend.

The six years I spent teaching public high school were not a detour from my education but an expressway to its heart. My former students still inspire me, especially Toussaint Bailey, Stephen Brockington, Sara Caro, Kristy Dougherty, J. R. Hale, Sarah Hill, Lakeisha Horne, Don Sargent, Tonya Sherfey, Sett Quinata, and the badass Odie Anaya.

These ideas were nurtured and shaped by my PhD study in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. I am grateful Viet Nguyen, George Sanchez, and Cynthia Young saw potential in my earliest work. Thank you also to USC faculty members who encouraged my research and showed me wonderful examples of professordom: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alice Gambrell, Ruthie Gilmore, Bill Handley, Lanita Jacobs, Josh Kun, Teresa McKenna, Karen Pinkus, Laura Pulido, David Román, Leland Saito, and Bruce Smith. Sharon Sekhon, now director of the Studio for Southern California History, gave heartfelt support. A timely visit by George Lipsitz convinced me I could feed myself writing about music. Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and Sandra Hopwood kept my act together!

I remain especially indebted to Carla Kaplan, Joanna Demers, Judith Jackson Fossett, and Fred Moten. Carla’s impeccable research acumen, tough-as-nails love, and insistence on my absolute best motivated me when I needed it most. Joanna’s work on electronic music and our walk-and-talks about the nature of “noise” charged me to listen differently. Judith had unwavering faith in me when my way was cloudy and will forever be my finest interlocutor; I am grateful for those nights at her table, drinking tea, listening to Stevie Wonder, and talking over her meticulous green-inked comments. Fittingly, words only inadequately describe my gratitude for Fred’s kind and prodigious example; his virtuoso riffs on blackness, sound, music, art, the academy, and politics rock my world then, now, and always.

I have sincere gratitude, love, and respect for the first three USC ASE graduate cohorts (2001–2003), with special shouts to Wendy Cheng, Michan Connor, Carolyn Dunn, Laura Sachiko Fujikawa, Jesús J. Hernández, Emily Hobson, Imani Kai Johnson, Viet Le, Sionne Neely, Daniel Wei Hosang, Nisha Kunte, Lata Murti, Phuong Nguyen, Luis Carlos Rodriguez, Ully Ryder, Anton Smith, Micaela Smith, Karen Yonemoto, and of course PhDivas Laura Barraclough, Ava Chin, Fiorella Cotrina, Michelle Commander, Araceli Esparza, Perla Guerrero, Nicole Hodges-Persley, Marci McMahon, and Cam Vu. Special amorcito to Hillary Jenks and reina alejandra prado—I love how our friendship continues to deepen. Much gratitude also to comrades across campus: Ruth Blandon, Zoë Corwin, Bridget Hoida, Shakira Holt, Gustavo Licón, Lalo Licón, Patricia Literte, Brooke Carlson, Memo Arce, and Andy Hakim. I remain so thankful for the attentive eye of my dear friend and writing partner Priscilla Peña Ovalle. None of this would have been possible without you, homegirl!

Chapters 1 and 5 began as public talks at the University of Rochester while I was a Predoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute of African and African American Studies (2005–2006). I am especially indebted to my mentor Jeff Tucker, Aubrey Anable, Dinah Holtzman, Cilas Kemendijo, Gloria Kim, Stephanie Li, the late Jesse Moore, Ghislaine Radegonde-Eison, A. Joan Saab, and to Anthea Butler for being absolutely EVERYTHING, still! A heartfelt thank you to Shaila Mehra and to stellar fellows Niambi Carter and Millery Polyné, who not only listened to, read, and shaped countless drafts but also became dear friends.

Thank you to Binghamton University, especially Provost Don Nieman, the Harpur Dean’s office, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. My departmental colleagues’ enthusiasm and faith in my scholarship, teaching, and blogging heartened me through challenging times. Thanks to David Bartine, Jaimee Colbert, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Thomas Glave, Aja Martinez, Bill Spanos, Susan Strehle, Libby Tucker, Al Tricomi, and Lisa Yun. My work especially benefitted from the rigorous attention of Donette Francis, Praseeda Gopinath, Joe Keith, and Monika Mehta. I also appreciate the cross-campus support of Nancy Applebaum, Ana Maria Candela, John Cheng, Ariana Gerstein, Robert Ji-Song Ku, Sean Massey, Monteith McCollum, Gladys Jimenez-Munoz, Andreas Pape, Emily Pape, Josh Price, Kelvin Santiago-Valles, Paul Schleuse, Pamela Smart, Wendy Stewart, Nancy Um, Brian Wall, and Michael West.

And of course my graduate students are THE REAL MVPS. ’Nuff respect to Tara Betts and Osvaldo Oyola for always asking the hard questions and being down to geek out on music. To Airek Beauchamp for lovely-yet-rigorous “Theory on Rollerskates” sessions. To Maria Chaves for meticulous research assistance, especially regarding decolonization as verb. Christie Zwahlen attuned my ear toward civic engagement. Wanda Alarcon’s work reminds us that DJs save our beautifully complex lives. Natalia Triana-Angel’s ability to hear history in music is next level. Thank you also to Barry Jackson for faith and enthusiasm! Several talented undergraduates journeyed with me on this and other projects I’m sure they had initially thought were crazy. Thanks especially to Marva Forsyth, Julian Harrison, Caleb Knapp, Jah-Sonnah MacAlister, Daniel Moore, Felicia Parrish, Michele Quiles, Seneca Sanders, Danny Santos, Dhruv Sehgal, Ashley Verbert, Charles Weiselberg, and Kymel Yard.

Former students, now colleagues/siblings, Liana Silva, Aaron Trammell, and I form like Voltron to make the Sounding Out! hive mind—the best team I have ever worked with. Thank you both for unswervingly being there with the quickness—always pushing me to my best and pulling for this project every step of the way, intellectually, emotionally, logistically, and with humor.

I wrote much of this manuscript as a Society for the Humanities Fellow at the A. D. White House at Cornell University. Much respect to director Tim Murray, administrative assistant Mary Ahl, and events coordinator Emily Parsons. For generative conversations, fine critiques, and basement jam sessions, I thank 2011–2012 fellows Eliot Bates, Miloje Despic, Nina Eidsheim, Sarah Ensor, Michael Jonik, Nicolas Knouf, Roger Moseley, Jamie Nisbet, and Jonathan Skinner, with special love to Marcus Boon, Duane Corpis, Ziad Fahmy, Brían Hanrahan, Damien Keane, Eric Lott, Tom McEnaney, Trevor Pinch, and Jeanette Jouili (and the Jouili-Kpai family). You guys rock.

Both sound studies and my own research are intellectually sustained and spiritually nourished by a community of talented scholars including Dolores Inés Casillas, Regina Bradley, Neil Verma, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Alexandra Vasquez, Tavia Nyong’o, Deb Vargas, Deb Paredes, Roshi Kheshti, Shana Redmond, Norma Coates, Marisol LeBron, Alejandro Madrid, Martin Daughtry, Leo Cardoso, Alex Russo, Steph Ceraso, Tara Rodgers, Ashon Crawley, Bill Bahng Boyer, Ben Tausig, Amanda Keeler, Rui Costa, Maile Colbert, Debra Rae Cohen, David Suisman, Mara Mills, Gina Arnold, and Shawn VanCour, who gave chapter 5 a great read. Special appreciation to Frances Aparicio, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, Emily Thompson, Gus Stadler, Josh Kun, and Jonathan Sterne for mentorship and those bold early noises in the field! And of course gratitude to the readers, writers, subscribers, and social media supporters of Sounding Out!, who motivate on the daily.

To the archivists who gave me keys to kingdoms: Matthew Colbert and David Coppen (Sibley Music Library in Rochester, New York), Jim Farrington (Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester), Lea Kemp and Kathryn Murano (Rochester Museum and Science Center), Beth Howse, Aisha Johnson, and Vanessa Smith (Special Collections, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk University), Christopher Harter (Amistad Research Center at Tulane University), Eisha Prather, Katherine Reagan, and Ben Ortiz (Kroch Special Collections at Cornell), Laura Russo (Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University), Alvin Singh (Lead Belly Foundation), and Andy Lanset, archivist for WNYC.

Special thanks goes to those who guided me through manuscript development and production. I am grateful for the motivation and guidance of Anne Bramley, Shakti Castro’s meticulous permissions research, and Cecelia Cancellaro’s intuitive and surgical editing. At NYU Press, Eric Zinner gifted me with sharp-eyed enthusiasm, patience, and unwavering belief in my project; my series editors and anonymous readers provided necessary nudges to new vistas, and Alicia Nadkarni and Erin Davis tirelessly moved the book along.

I finished this book as I was warmly welcomed to Ithaca, New York. The friendship of SAMMUS, Kebbeh Gold, Nandi Cohen, Ben Ortiz, Travis Gosa, Jessica Gosa, Belisa Gonzales, Phuong Nguyen, Betty Nguyen, Tavo Licón, Sandra Bruno, and Claudia Verhoeven, and Hawk and Ahimsa Tuesdays/Fridays sustained me during the last push.

This book would not exist without the wonderful people who have cared for my son, especially the excellent teachers at the Vestal Jewish Community Center who helped raise him right. Thank you especially to Debbie Mohr (and daughter Hallie) for loving us as family. Denise and Mike Stabile are wonderful grandparents/supporters of this working, writing, researching, traveling single parent, along with Uncle Will Stabile.

Immeasurable love and gratitude to my mom, Pinkie, who always took me to the library, listened to my stories, and encouraged me to go to graduate school (even though it was a crazy idea, Mom!); her vegetable soup fueled many of these pages. To my grandma Mema, who read to me and assembled my very first single-authored publications out of the scraps my grandpa brought home from the paper-cup factory. I also thank my aunt Mary Anne, uncle Greg, aunt Mary, sister Jackie, and brother-in-law Steve; I am grateful for the joy my nieces Molly and Megan and nephew Mason have brought. To those who have passed, forever in my heart and in these pages: my dad, Jeff, Grandpa Smokey, Great-Grandma Irene, Grandpa Walt, and Grandma Maryanne. To my son, Martin—for you, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the book! Finally, I thank my dog, He Who Cannot Be Named (2002–2016), for the countless hours he spent stretched out on my office rug, encouraging me to stay put and write. All the treats are his and any mistakes definitely mine.

Portions of chapter 5 appeared as “Fine-tuning the Sonic Color-line: Radio and the Acousmatic DuBois,” in a special issue on radio, in Modernist Cultures 10, no. 1 (2015): 99–118, and in Italian as “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sonic Color-line,” in a special issue on W. E. B. Du Bois, in Studi Culturali (April 2013): 71–88.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “The Word and the Sound: Listening to the Sonic Color-line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” in SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience (Fall 2011): 20–36.

Theorizations of the sonic color line and the listening ear appeared in nascent form in “Reproducing U.S. Citizenship in a Blackboard Jungle: Race, Cold War Liberalism, and the Tape Recorder,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011): 781–806, and “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York,” Social Text 102 (Spring 2010): 59–85.

And finally, this book also bears the deep affective traces and influence of Tyisha Miller (1979–1999), a student in the first high school English class I ever taught, and James Martinez (1976–1997), my high school boyfriend’s smart and hilarious cousin, both killed by police in Riverside County. I have mourned them both for almost twenty years now; these photographs remind me they were once so very beautifully, heartbreakingly, brilliantly alive.

While both images still wound, the photograph of Tyisha, in particular, bears symbolic resonance: here she performs as Mama Younger from A Raisin in the Sun alongside her classmates, who eagerly hand her “the first present in her life without it being Christmas,” as Lorraine Hansberry’s stage directions say. In the play, this moment comes as the Younger family ready themselves to leave their squalid tenement apartment to desegregate Chicago’s all-white suburbs. I regret that in that moment, I, then a twenty-one-year-old white woman with a lot to learn, focused far too much on the new possibilities for the Younger family; I did not stress enough the blood, bravery, resistance, and death that paid for such possibilities and the violence of the white perpetrators who certainly awaited the family’s moving van (as they did Hansberry’s own family’s). The joy that Tyisha radiates as she accepts the gift of a new future—shining despite murder and time and my misteachings—haunts and inspires.

Christmas, 1993, Grandma Vera’s House, Riverside, California. James second from left. Photo by author.

May 1996, Rubidoux High School, Riverside, California. Tyisha at center. Photo by author.

I have listened to this snapshot of James and this Polaroid of Tyisha for almost twenty years now, hearing their voices and the unyielding whiteness that silenced them. I will always have a lot to learn, but, at long last, this book amplifies what I have heard these many years. May the photograph infuse the phonograph (and vice versa) with the resistant resonance of the past and the present so that we can listen out toward a future world where children of color thrive and freely share their gifts. A world, at long last, worthy of Tyisha’s smile, with streets safe for James Martinez Junior, now almost as old as his father ever would be, and his spitting image.