The written archive has deeply influenced understanding of the Atlantic world as a site of exchange among Africans, Europeans and Americans. In 16^th-18^th-century Contact narratives, sound and music receive ample attention. Nevertheless, auditory practices outside the traditional Western canon are difficult to represent via text or image. Scripted accounts often “silence” black voices and obscure access to Afro-descendant sounds. Furthermore, sonorities or the lack thereof are frequent tropes in scholarship on the black Atlantic, and their prominence suggests the productivity of sound as an analytical lens.

For all this, a central question emerges: how do scholars reconstruct early African Atlantic soundways while remaining sensitive to the dynamics of power at play in written representation? In response, this panel take a position of “listening” to the auditory diaspora, as opposed to the more agentive “sounding.” Our approaches join the ear’s open form with listening’s intentionality to seek new methods for attending to the region’s black sonorities.

Due to the apparent inaudibility of Afro-descendant voices in the archive, early black and African soundscapes are relatively understudied. We thus place sound studies into dialogue with the emergent early modern black diaspora studies, anthologized in Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones and Miles P. Grier’s 2018 edited volume. Broadly, our presentations respond to critiques of Anglocentrism in sound studies and also address the dearth of methodologies for examining pre-recorded sound.

Miguel Valerio opens the panel with a discussion of what visual evidence can tell us about black sounds in the early Iberian Atlantic. He casts a wide diasporic net across the region, from Spain to Buenos Aires, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, bringing together textual fragments and visual evidence to investigate what these sources tell us about early modern Afro-Iberian music. While the textual sources often give a negative view of black music, Valerio contends that we must read them for what they can tell us about Afro-Iberian musical practices when read critically. For the visual evidence, with Tina M. Campt, he invites us “to ‘listen to’ rather than simply ‘look at’ images,” for they reveal an element “that is critical to Black Atlantic cultural formations: sound.” In other words, we must consider sonic evidence embedded in images of early modern Afro-Iberians’ musical practices. Paired with the texts, these images allow us to gain peephole view into vibrant early modern world Afro-Iberian sound.

Turning to the Atlantic coasts of Africa and the English-speaking Caribbean, Mary Caton Lingold analyzes narrative and illustrated scenes of instrumental music-making. When European travelers described African performances, they often commented on sounds created by intricate embellishments attached to instruments and performers’ bodies. For instance, travel author Richard Jobson described a Gambian bala player who wore metal bracelets with “juggling toyes” (1623) and John Matthews described large drums ornamented with “shark’s teeth or bits of copper ....Which make a jingling noise” in Sierra Leone (1788). These audio technologies visually and sonically decorated musicians’ performance. Lingold’s presentation considers how Europeans’ misinterpretation of these sounds and their multi-sensory aesthetic contributed significantly to emergent tropes of Black musicality and other forms of sonic racism. She will also discuss how enslaved musicians adapted sonic technologies to the material constraints of life under slavery. How did the sounds of African performance and their meaning change from one side of the Atlantic to the other?

Sarah Finley brings the panel focus back to the Spanish Atlantic with a presentation that “hears” black sounds in the visually dominant archive. Given the epistemological disparities created by the colonial privileging of alphabetic writing, she argues that traditional inquiry inadequately captures African and Afro-descendant auditory culture. One problem is limited emic documentation of popular music and speech. Another is the thorny politics of inscription, whereby textual representations silence black subjects. In response, Finley elaborates a framework of echolocation that allows contemporary access to muted voices of the past. Her trans-geographic, temporally fluid approach places Afro-diasporic audio artifacts in dialogue with black sonorities from the Spanish Atlantic. For example, she shows how Zora Neale Hurston’s recordings of work songs from the American South can phonographically re-inscribe the voices of 17^th-century Afro-Mexican obraje laborers in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s writing. This auditory mode amplifies the orality that undergirds many sub-Saharan cultures and also attends to intercultural and intersectional resonances throughout the Atlantic world.

This is a traditional panel with formal presentation titles. We will limit presentations to 14 minutes. 10 minutes of commentary from the respondent will follow the three papers, leaving 15 minutes or more for discussion.