Introduction to Critical Forum: The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism

The following critical forum, "The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism," takes as its point of departure Carter Mathes's Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights, published in 2015 by the University of Minnesota Press. Mathes's groundbreaking work demonstrates the exciting conceptual and political affordances of black experimental literature for contemporary literary and cultural studies. His book does not simply bring together the fields of black studies, sound studies, and literary studies—it profoundly reimagines their points of convergence. Focused primarily on African American experimental literature and music, Imagine the Sound argues that the sonic dimensions of black experimentalism open out onto histories of black radicalism that have been repressed, forgotten, or marginalized by predominant narratives about the Black Arts Movement and black postmodernism. Mathes advocates for close listening as a method to recover the inchoate potentialities and resistant auralities of postwar African American experimental literature. Through their sonic experimentations, these texts afford more capacious and radical notions about black freedom and sociality than those sanctioned within the post-Civil Rights Era.

Among its many contributions, Imagine the Sound makes a strong case for understanding sound as an experimental dimension of the aesthetic that outstrips restrictive boundaries of genre and other "simplified categories of interpretation" (18). Indeed, Mathes draws inspiration from Zora Neale Hurston's foundational identification of "an improvisational impulse within the sound that exceeds flattened constructions of race and culture." Hurston anticipates and makes possible Imagine the Sound's attunement to a "fusion of sonority, temporality, and narration that has political implications in signaling different orientations toward black historical consciousness" (17). Mathes discovers this fusion within an expansive archive of writers and musicians, including John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor. Listening for the sounds that reverberate out through their experimentations with form, Imagine the Sound beckons readers into new phenomenological and historical relations with the Civil Rights Era and its aftermath. In this regard, Mathes's title is an invitation to think and feel—to imagine, in the fullest sense of the verb—literary sound in all of its corporeal density and political vitality.

Our contributors take up this invitation by recontextualizing Imagine the Sound within different fields of scholarship and cultural debate. As outlined in the introduction to this issue, each contributor was encouraged to reflect on how the experimental methods and archives of Imagine the Sound might be brought to bear on other areas of inquiry. As is clear from their responses, Mathes opens new horizons for thinking about the sonic politics of black experimentalism in many fields, including hip hop studies, time studies, new phenomenologies of reading, black feminism, queer of color critique, and black radical mysticism, among others. The conversation that unfolds within this forum testifies to multiple kinds of inquiry that experimental aesthetics engender. Far from seeing experimentalism as a step back from the social, each of these essays insists on its imbrication with the lived and historical experiences of people of color. Indeed, they draw inspiration from Mathes's understanding of experimentation as a means to break open the racist epistemologies that enclose black culture. Following Toni Cade Bambara, Mathes teaches us to understand "critical thought as phenomenological and experiential" (149). Collectively, the contributors take up this integration of affect and critique, and they stress that the politics of black experimentalism cannot be understood without an attunement to its affective dimensions. In Mathes's words, the affective liveliness of black experimentalism engenders "radical openings onto new and evolving paradigms of African American aesthetic form and critical thought" (200). The following essays pursue such radical openings through their own experiments with form and thought.