Back to Results
Cover image of Sound Clash
Cover image of Sound Clash
Share this Title:

Sound Clash

Listening to American Studies

edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun

Publication Date
Binding Type

The field of American studies has a long tradition of scholarship and research into the social and cultural worlds of sound. The essays in this volume highlight the key role of sound in the formation of central themes and areas of inquiry within contemporary American studies.

The editors have adopted an interdisciplinary approach to their study of sound, reflecting on its cultural, political, technological, economic, socio-historical, spatial, temporal, affective, and formal contexts. The selected essays analyze sound and explore inter-American soundscapes within several areas, including

• media...

The field of American studies has a long tradition of scholarship and research into the social and cultural worlds of sound. The essays in this volume highlight the key role of sound in the formation of central themes and areas of inquiry within contemporary American studies.

The editors have adopted an interdisciplinary approach to their study of sound, reflecting on its cultural, political, technological, economic, socio-historical, spatial, temporal, affective, and formal contexts. The selected essays analyze sound and explore inter-American soundscapes within several areas, including

• media technologies and consumption
• race, sex, and gender
• citizenship, belonging, and community
• nationalism and citizenship
• time and historical method
• the public sphere and social change

How have sound technologies and sonic media practices informed American identities? What role have hearing and listening played in formations of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, community, and class? What are the political economies of sound? The contributors to Sound Clash address these questions and more as they think through sound as a critical space, listening as a critical and cultural act, and sonic media as key technological sites of investigation.

Supplementary sound clips are available at the American Quarterly website, www.americanquarterly.org.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
440
ISBN
9781421405711
Illustration Description
29 halftones
Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Part I: Sound Technologies and Subjectivities
Chapter 1. Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewing's A Reading, Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph
Chapter 2. Intimacy Threats and

Preface
Introduction
Part I: Sound Technologies and Subjectivities
Chapter 1. Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewing's A Reading, Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph
Chapter 2. Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962
Chapter 3. "What, for me, constitutes life in a sound?": Electronic Sounds as Lively and Differentiated Individuals
Chapter 4. Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio
Chapter 5. The Recording Studio on Stage: Liveness in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Chapter 6. Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space
Part II: Sounding Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
Chapter 7. "An Indian in a White Man's Camp": Johnny Cash's Indian Country Music
Chapter 8. Abolitionism's Resonant Bodies: The Realization of African American Performance
Chapter 9. Marian Anderson and "Sonic Blackness" in American Opera
Chapter 10. Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space
Chapter 11. Back Door Man: Howlin' Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow
Chapter 12. Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture Industry
Part III: Sound, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere
Chapter 13. The "War on Noise": Sound and Space in La Guardia's New York
Chapter 14. Forced Listening: The Contested Use of Loudspeakers for Commercial and Political Messages in the Public Soundscape
Chapter 15. Reproducing U.S. Citizenship in Blackboard Jungle: Race, Cold War Liberalism, and the Tape Recorder
Chapter 16. Sounds of Surveillance: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio Patrols La Migra
Chapter 17. The Political Agency of Musical Beauty
Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Josh Kun

Josh Kun is an associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America.