Music Against the Subject

In Toni Morrison's Jazz a subject/object fails to capture the story. Saidiya Hartman has analyzed how under symbolic capture black music becomes a legalistic "property of enjoyment" for fantasies of subjection. Following Hartman, Western subjectivity is an affective carceral-legal structure built by a symbolic attachment to blackness. I'll consider how the formal nuances of Morrison's Jazz and James Van Der Zee's The Harlem Book of the Dead offer a black feminist epistemic that tries to think through the unmarked and unwieldy sonic dimensions of black music as black life that evade symbolic containment and capture in and as the subject.