“The mind is a strange and terrible vehicle”: Fractured Time and Multidimensional Sound in No Name in the Street

In this essay I examine the presence of sound as a means of expanding the literary and political dimensions of James Baldwin’s 1972 text, No Name in the Street. I argue that Baldwin extends his ideas of blues aesthetics as a window into black political consciousness, and that he more broadly attends to the acoustic qualities of his prose in an effort to critically diagnose a darkening post-civil rights reality marking the late 1960s and early ’70s.