Black Scale: Constructing “Haunted” Overpasses as Relational Methodologies

Abstract

This article introduces Black scale—a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological gathering of Blackness, music, sound, and locationality—that foregrounds the interdependence of scale and racialization. This framework explores how racial capitalist de|restructuring of space and place and intersectional personhood reshapes a Black sense of place through a “Black sense of scale” and its musical and sonic modalities. Through a geomusicological and geosonicological reading of Beyoncé’s “Haunted,” we add sociosonic textures to notions of “sense” and deepen how we think with individual and communal scales of Black poetic and material sociocultural production. This approach stresses how Black people are shaped by, but also produce a multitude of scales through Black auditory placemaking. Next, we present the overpass—a Black scalar methodology—to think with relational geographic articulations of the corporeal and material that analyze how racialized infrastructure divides space, but fosters communal refutations and the reformatting of these imposed places. Empirically, overpasses cannot be comprehended solely from above; they require multifaceted views that recognize lifeworlds in the interstices. By examining the relationality across music, sound, and Blackness, we (re)activate and engage scale as a racialized, evolving, intimately embodied, and subjective interpretation of the world as well as structural, objective descriptions of it.