Sound, Aesthetics, and Black Time Studies

Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights is as much a stunning treatise on experimental black aesthetics as it is an invitation to imagine blackness, politics, and literary history anew. With critical depth and poetic prose that rival the virtuosity and brilliance of the book's protagonists, Carter Mathes elaborates the striking relationship between sound and black artistic expression in a period he dubs the "long Black Arts Movement" era (1965–1980). Analyzing the significant if critically underexamined role of experimental writing during the Black Arts Movement, Mathes uncovers visions of social transformation and grammars of political expression that do not so easily accord with ironclad paradigms of black cultural nationalism. Grounded in the textual and sonic matter of black art, this fresh approach to black aesthetics opens up new critical avenues to pursue questions and thematics—from space and innovation to phenomenology and environmental writing—that are vital to contemporary literary studies and social theory. In the time that I have in this forum, I want to focus on Mathes's engagement with one of these concepts: that is, time.

By focalizing the intersections of sound and black experimental writing, Imagine the Sound exposes the role of time in shaping the racial, economic, and socio-political orders of global modernity. On the one hand, Mathes frames time as a discursive construct through which knowledge, power, and experience are produced and policed. But on the other hand, he demonstrates how black writers and artists—like John Coltrane, Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, Sarah Webster Fabio, Amiri Baraka, Toni Cade Bambara, and James Baldwin—have used time to reorient black people's relationships to the scriptive protocols of western time and the premises of anti-blackness from which they emerge. This framing of time as a technology of power and resistance animates and enlivens the book's five chapters. In this way, Imagine the Sound joins recent work by scholars such as Anthony Reed, Calvin Warren, Gary Wilder, Michelle Wright, and my own forthcoming work on what I call "black patience" that contributes to the emergence of a field that we might call Black Time Studies.¹ Like most scholars working in this field, Mathes turns to black literary and cultural production to map the racial character and the social function of time, unfurling its role in the historical project of anti-blackness. But he expands this discourse by demonstrating how the convergence of sound and black experimental writing in the long Black Arts Movement offers a key window into comprehending the social, political, and aesthetic uses of time for freedom and subjugation, for tyranny and revolution. If scholars working in the field of Black Time Studies have elaborated the racial limits and extravagant violences of linear time, Mathes builds on these critical efforts. He arrives at fresh insights, however, by thinking this temporal phenomenon in relation to the beautifully discordant chaos of black experimental sound and writing.

Imagine the Sound opens by examining the experimental lineaments of John Coltrane's late sound. Paying particular attention to a live 1967 performance at the Olatunji Center for African Culture in Harlem, Mathes details how Coltrane's turn to free jazz broke with western musical aesthetics while unsettling the cultural and epistemological norms they set out to codify. According to Mathes, Coltrane allows us to "rehear the experimental sound emanating from free jazz as a refusal of mainstream culture on both aesthetic and cultural terms. This struggle against the containment of form," Mathes continues, "reimagines freedom as a totality that can't be considered through constructs of linear historical time" (2015, 31). Therefore, rather than reifying and operating within the linear temporalities of modern thought and expressive culture, Coltrane deforms and plays with the rapid, forward-moving impulse of modern time. He does so by fashioning a free jazz sound that "elongates temporal spaces," thereby cultivating an environment of duration that engenders different aesthetic and phenomenological horizons for performers and audiences alike (29, 35). Affording radical opportunities to reimagine the time signatures of black sound and black experience, Coltrane's late sound offers a...