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214 In a 2006 book on the intellectual history of the Caribbean, author Silvio TorresSaillant writes critically about the region’s music and questions whether music and musicians, despite their commercial success, actually bring any “discernible benefit” to the region (33). Evoking the historic Peace concert in Jamaica in 1978 when Bob Marley famously summoned political foes Michael Manley and Edward Seaga to the stage to shake hands, Torres-Saillant argues that this was one of the few examples of music and musicians having any significant, albeit short-lived, effect on the sociopolitical reality of a Caribbean country. Taking issue with the general perception that music can influence the material existence of Caribbean people, he argues that there is an “apparent incongruity between the power that writers and cultural critics ascribe to Caribbean music and the power that the rhythms and their performers have actually exhibited in the modern history of the region” (33). Moreover, he says, the “insertion of rhythms” from the region into the global music market has led to the “diminished relevance of Caribbean literature and thought production” (33) and has coincided with a regrettable but decisive “shrinking of the space” of the Caribbean “intellectual arena” (40). While Torres-Saillant is no doubt right to question the assumption that there is a straightforward connection between music and social progress, he makes the error of dismissing music almost entirely, as if it were an aspect of culture whose worth, import, and influence could only be measured by tangible social change. In turning away more or less completely from music and rhythm, Torres-Saillant closes down an area of inquiry that has only been partially investigated and that requires the formulation of new questions, new approaches, and new theoretical Conclusion Listening to New World History Conclusion 215 paradigms to bring to light its deeper significance. In effect, Torres-Saillant closes his ears to a cacophonous history, one that, as this book has shown, has been shaped to a significant extent by music, rhythms, and sounds. What is required now is not the silencing of Caribbean and New World history but a new awareness and understanding of all its auditory aspects. We need, in short, to open our ears and listen to history. THE SOUND AND THE THEORY We may think we know—from old images, paintings, and even films—what slavery looked like, but how did it sound? We can perhaps conjure up images of the slave ship, the plantation, slave revolts, and slave dances, but can we put a soundtrack to those images, or do they run muted in our imaginations like silent movies? Were the sounds of slavery similar across the plantations of the New World, from Brazil to Virginia? Do these sounds die with the passage of time and the institution of plantation slavery, or do they survive, mutate, and evolve so that they may be heard even today in their commuted forms? If sounds do not die completely, what particular sounds have persisted through time and can still be heard today, and do these sounds constitute living ties with the past, parts of history that have outlived slavery and yet still bear witness to the lived experience of bondage? How can we listen to the past when sound is, by its nature, evanescent , when it fades as quickly as it comes, and when the ability to record sounds is historically a new development? The task of tuning in and listening to the past, of “hearing history,” is not a new undertaking. From classical antiquity to the nineteenth century, thinkers have reflected on the nature of hearing, listening, and aurality.1 In the midtwentieth century, too, historians of the French Annales school and theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong wrote influential works on the history of the senses in general, including the history of aurality and listening. In the 1970s, with the prominence of the study of social history, interest in aural history continued to grow and was complemented by related work on intellectual history and the history of seeing, notably Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes.2 Thus, interest in the history of sound is not new, but modern historians, wary of and skeptical about the “hypervisual” (Bailey 2004, 23) nature of the modern world and the neglect of the other senses, are now listening to the past with greater intensity. They have extended the history of aurality beyond the boundaries of music and musicology and are considering sound in all its varieties, from...

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