The Sound of Silence: Slavery and the Southern Landscape

Historians who have examined the sounds of American slavery and the soundscape of plantation cultures quite reasonably focus on the audible transcript left by the enslaved. Song, folktale, hollers, and religiously inspired sound contributed to an audible slave culture, that Shane and Graham White conclude, “was made to be heard.” These audible and visible shards of slave testimony constitute what Valentin Yves Mudimbe refers to as “a matrix of memory,” a diasporic African “orature.” As literary scholars Mudimbe, Adélékè Adéèkó, and Tim Armstrong observe, the aural soundscape of slavery leaves “sonic echoes” of subaltern agency and visibility deep into the twentieth century. This paper, however, builds upon my previous work on African-American and Afro-Brazilian expressive culture to examine silence as a sonic echo of slavery. How in the first instance do we interpret the disparate values associated to silence when West African anthropologists in particular have drawn attention to the cultural importance of silence, feints, and breaks in the polyrhythmic structure to African diasporic music, dance, and performativity. The good dancer or performer “tunes his ear to hidden rhythms, and he dances to the gaps in the music.” Indeed, if we examine black “orature” as a coded system of signs where the fictional or performative self has a strongly political dimension, both as self-description within a racialized order and as a strategy of resistance, then even the silences of slavery command attention for their transgressive potential. In this presentation This paper focuses on those hidden, silent rhythms, the gaps within slave dance and music that provide a particularly contested site for black self-representation.