The Ethics of Unmeaning: Noise and the Non-inscribable Slave Voice

Abstract

The Ethics of Unmeaning: Noise and the Non-inscribable Slave Voice Edward Piñuelas In the nexus of literature from within chattel slavery, music has provided scholars of various slave traditions a potent material for reading the influences of enslavement on everyday life in bondage, as well as the remnants of that life in contemporary culture. It was slave music that caused W. E. B. Du Bois to “set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men” (536), and provided Frederick Douglass “[his] first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery” (51). In short, the music of the enslaved and their immediate descendants has provided a window into aspects of the experiences of enslaved people not easily communicated through written testimony, as well as a medium for expressing Black subjectivities in ways denied by the mechanisms of racial slavery. This is especially true in the United States, where the work song and the spiritual have come to form their own genre of literature, offering expressive traditions that exceeded and often resisted those of the master class. These traditions have served as the fundamental building blocks of culture and civil society throughout the United States and have been essential to freedom struggles and political organization since slavery’s abolition. Shana L. Redmond’s recent work on Black music in social and political movements within the Diaspora provides a poignant example of how the spiritual provided postbellum movements with the rhythmic and thematic material to mobilize African American laborers and community organizations (Anthem 146–47). This turn to Black music as a political object began in the antebellum period, when abolitionists pointed to the music and songs of enslaved communities, particularly western religious hymns and spirituals, as evidence of slaveholders’ failing attempts to dehumanize their captives. [End Page 161] Ironically, the very music used by abolitionists to condemn the peculiar institution provided the slaveholding class evidence of its uplifting, indeed humanizing, effects. Many supporters of slavery heard in work songs signs of contentment and in religious songs signs of salvation. As Roger D. Abrahams explains in his historical account of slave music in the antebellum South, “[s]inging and dancing were regarded as signs of happiness, in spite of the fact that many whites could understand that the songs were often about the agonies of separation and alienation” (xix). These interpretations were more than mere misreadings of the often veiled expressions of sadness and resentment among enslaved singers, more than mere selective understandings that sought to confirm biases and assumptions already in place. They resulted from a mode of listening that sought to make meaning of a foreign, though familiar, phenomenon by relating it to assumptions common among members of the master class. In seeking to abstract from the material elements of slave music—the ephemeral, physical, and spatial phenomena of sounding and hearing—slavery’s advocates resorted to discursive practices contingent upon a disembodied, interchangeable, exchangeable enslaved body, a body that does not mark its domain with sound, but communicates only as sign. This reliance on exchangeability and reified value echoes what Saidiya V. Hartman notably identifies as the “fungibility” of the enslaved, the “joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity” (21). Faced with a material form of which they were neither the catalyst nor the prescribers, slaveowners and slavery’s supporters often described the music of the enslaved according to narrative frameworks based on this fungibility, not unlike those used for interpreting slave value, productivity, and soundness. These frameworks fundamentally disembodied enslaved voices so as to provide members of the master class a grammar of slave sound. In the process of figuring African American voices through the mechanics of fungibility, these proslavery depictions of Black voices likewise figured an antebellum southern soundscape loaded with numerous cultural and social values meant to buttress the moral argument in favor of the peculiar institution. While opponents of slavery sought to correct the misreadings produced by this body of proslavery literature, I argue here that even in seeking to assign enslaved voices alternative meanings, meanings that [End Page 162] were themselves salvos...