"After It Happened There Seemed to Be a Pause, Then the Fear Was Everywhere": On Carter Mathes's Sonic Genres of Resistance

In No Name in the Street (1972), a book Carter Mathes reads with particular insight and care in Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights, James Baldwin recounts his first encounter with the US South. Having arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, on assignment in the late 1950s, he decides to explore the town and look for a meal. When he enters a segregated restaurant, a white waitress and white stranger on the street direct him to the "colored entrance." Of the stranger Baldwin writes: "I realized that this man thought that he was being kind; and he was, indeed, being as kind as can be expected from a guide in hell" (2007, 72). Although he has lost his appetite, Baldwin follows the "guide's" directions to the other side of the counter and so begins his investigative report.

Mathes's directive to "imagine the sound" counters the directions of this guide through hell. Particular acts of listening anchor the book, whose title is an imperative. "Imagine" is what Mathes's writing invites us (and makes it possible for us) to do. The book proposes that if we can conjure, listen to, and write the sound of a movement we might continue its work against white supremacy and violence.

What I find most revelatory about Mathes's account of the sounds that echo after the civil rights movement are the variety of the sounds and the range of sites in which Mathes hears them. Imagine the Sound joins and anticipates a broad field of recent sound studies in African American literary studies, including Fred Moten's In the Break (2003), Meta Jones's The Muse is the Music (2008), Alexandra Vazquez's Listening in Detail (2013), Alexander Wehiliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Modernity (2005), Brent Hayes Edwards's recent Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), and Nicole Brittingham Furlonge's Race Sounds (2018). Like these, Imagine the Sound is attuned to the intimate relationship between specific forms of Black music and literary instantiations of sound. One premise for the book is Mathes's argument, in his first chapter, that the experiments of free jazz were conceptual, potentially intersecting with, shaping, and mirroring poetic and narrative improvisation. Beginning with John Coltrane's final recording, this chapter extends a reading of Coltrane's musical narration to Amiri Baraka's performance with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Henry Grimes, Sonny Murray, and Louis Worrell, of his iconic poem "Black Art," a manifesto of the Black Arts Movements. Similarly, chapter two thinks of Henry Dumas's short fiction in relation to Sun Ra's sound.

As exciting as it is to follow Mathes's elegant tracing of musical/literary pairings, another strong current in the book proves the more exceptional. At its center are several sonic interpretations of scenes readers might not interpret as musical or aura. Sound often erupts in the midst of significant historical junctures in the story of American race relations. Imagine the Sound begins, for example, with a tour de force reading of the opening paragraphs of Assata Shakur's autobiography. Mathes replays the sound of Shakur's encounter with the police, constituting a description of state violence and a "vocalization of black fugitive resistance" (2015, 3). Mathes later reads Black Arts Movement poet Larry Neal's eye-witness account of the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X as resonant, in its emphasis on wailing, with Neal's interests in "New Music." In doing so, he uncovers an aesthetic relationship between political and literary spheres.

Mathes describes the struggle not only in pivotal scenes of violence, but also in sounds of the everyday, which are always adjacent to history and politics. In Tony Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, sound is "a sensory framework for narrating the quotidian and inchoate aspects of struggle" (Mathes 2015, 138). And Mathes hears a striking example of quotidian sound in the cry of a baby marking familial expansion in Baldwin's innovative No Name in the Street. "You know the sound—the...