Silence and Screaming: the Sound of Afri

Why and when do we scream or remain silent? Do we scream out of joy or in terror? Do we remain silent out of respect or fear? Perhaps more importantly, who screams (or who do we scream at), and who remains silent? And how do we register those sonic utterances in between the extremes of screaming and silence, the groans, moans, coughs, and grunts that resist transcription? This course develops out of the convergence between the study of African American Literature and Sound Studies to examine the affective and political resonances of these auditory modes. In this course we will think about how screaming, silence, and utterances are embodied auditory practices marked by race, gender, and sexuality that the artists on this syllabus transcribe into text, music, and image. These three auditory modes, screaming, silence, and utterance, share the commonality of being difficult to transcribe into written text and of being difficult to understand: they resist singularity and definition. In this course we will examine how writers, composers, performers, and directors engage in the ambivalences of these auditory modes. Our goal is not to remove that ambivalence, to clearly or definitively decide what something means, but to investigate the multiplicity contained within that ambivalence. No prerequisites.