Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature by Nicole Brittingham Furlonge (review)

Nicole Brittingham Furlonge's Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature makes a significant contribution to the growing field of black literary sound studies by orienting readerly attention toward practices of textual listening. Furlonge mines the relationship between the scriptural and auditory in African American literature in order to shift focus from the soundings, as it were, of African American literature toward practices of hearing and listening, and their potential interpretive capacities. In so doing, she revisits canonical texts including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Brown's "Ma Rainey," Ellison's Invisible Man, Jones's Corrigedora, and Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident to suggest a new hearing for the auditory aspects of these works. These texts, Furlonge contends, "activate listening as a dynamic aural practice of cultural, political, and intellectual engagement" (6). Thus, Furlonge draws from a long intellectual history in black studies wherein "sound . . . functions as a key metaphoric, structural, and epistemic site of black cultural identity" to theorize the unattended and understudied "role of listening in interpretive work" (7). Listening, for Furlonge, offers another critical mechanism by which to examine social assumptions regarding, and literary constructions of, racial difference while also functioning as "an aural form of agency, a practice of citizenship, an aural empathy, an ethics of community building, a mode of social and political action [and] a set of strategies for cultural revision" (10). Race Sounds posits listening as an embodied, historical, and material act—one that in its best cultural and artistic practices may be capable of fomenting sociopolitical change.

Opening the book with a gloss of Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Furlonge centers the role of ethical listener as witness/auditor, as well as the ways in which listening is a visceral practice of the whole body—claims central to the monograph's argument as a whole. Structured "iteravely," or in a manner that grounds each chapter in a specific mode or site of literary listening, Race Sounds nevertheless retains a fairly chronological structure (15). In chapter one, Furlonge reconsiders Their Eyes were Watching God and "Ma Rainey" by explicating the ways in which Hurston and Brown provide models for listening while also imagining and constructing audiences for their own work (and, by extension, for African American literature broadly). Furlonge assesses how each of the author's experiences as ethnographers informs their textual constructions of sound and listening. She claims that a "sonic acuity" of listening, performing, and transcribing inflects both Hurston's and Brown's writing such that they "preserve folk culture while also representing the folk in new ways" (23, 21). What seems to be at stake in Furlonge's close listening to these texts is a foregrounding of the fact that listening is a learned and relational practice demanding active, reciprocal exchange between speaker and listener, one that she ultimately understands as "a civic responsibility" (27) most prominently modeled by Pheoby in Their Eyes. Moreover, Furlonge asserts, Pheoby calls attention to the "robust and muted tropes" surrounding listening in "African American and black feminist letters" (26). Important although perhaps underattended in her explication of "Ma Rainey," Furlonge positions female auditors and sounding figures as cointerpreters as well as representatives of blacks' experiences. While focusing upon the ways in which Brown models and demands varied types of participatory listening in "Ma Rainey," less attention is paid in her analysis of the poem to Ma's figural location as not simply responder and re-sounder, but interpreter of communal loss and pain.

Moving from Brown's and Hurston's sonic constructions of their own reading/ listening audiences through modeling active, reciprocal listening, chapter two interrogates listening as an "aural strategy of engagement" in Invisible Man (42). Invisible Man offers an expansive site for sonic engagement given Ellison's intense textual explorations of sound and listening. Furlonge turns to Ellison's oft-cited essay "Living with Music" to interrogate the...