Silencing "Savage" SoundscapesHearing C-Section Births in the British Imperial Record Erin Johnson-Williams (bio) The operator stood, as I entered the hut, on her left side, holding his knife aloft with his right hand, and muttering an incantation. This being done, he washed his hands and the patient's abdomen, first with banana wine and then with water. Then, having uttered a shrill cry, which was taken up by a small crowd assembled outside the hut, he proceeded to make a rapid cut in the middle line. —Robert W. Felkin (1884)1 Surgical births, just like their "natural" counterparts, are noisy. The written record of surgical deliveries has, however, largely silenced female and ethnic minority experiences of medicalized reproductive sound.2 Conversely, the historiography—or what I call here the "imperial record"—of surgical births has long been racialized and gendered as falling within the domain of white, male Western medicine. I offer two case studies of Victorian medical narratives where anxieties about reproductive sound reinforced an imperial fantasy that the [End Page 101] Cesarean section (hereafter, C-section) was a (silent) Western (male) technology.3 A separate growth of recent popular fiction about the life of James Barry (1799–1865), an Irish transgender surgeon who allegedly "brought" the technology of the C-section to colonial South Africa, has largely reinforced this fantasy, fueling transphobic and misogynistic narratives about silencing women.4 Challenging this narrative, the British travel writer and doctor Robert W. Felkin (1853–1926), as noted above, describes evocatively the "shrill cry" of an Indigenous Ugandan healer over his surgical instrument during the course of a successful C-section delivery.5 While ascribing medical authority to the Indigenous healer, Felkin's description of sound is limited to the (male) healer's utterances, further robbing the pregnant woman of sonic agency during surgery.6 Drawing on ideas from postcolonial studies, intersectional feminist theory, Victorian scientific theory, and sound studies, I question why the sounds of surgical delivery have been "taken away" from women through the Western medicalization and racialization of childbirth.7 As such, I acknowledge that my sources are dominated by English-language materials, but I focus on these records as a way to explore systemic patriarchal attitudes to what Anija Doktor has described as the "vulvar vocality" of maternal reproduction.8 In the case studies below, I examine [End Page 102] how two of the most famous records of successful surgical births in the nineteenth century took place on the African continent (Uganda and South Africa).9 While women's reproductive voices are virtually absent from the existing archive of nineteenth-century surgical deliveries, the practitioners involved in both case studies challenged the paradigm of the "white, male surgeon": in one case, the surgeon was a transgendered Irish doctor; in the other, an Indigenous male Ugandan healer. I suggest, therefore, that the racial and gendered frames of surgical authority in these accounts are remarkably volatile: as has long been established, Black African women were not considered worthy of archiving as "people" for a lot of Western written history.10 The infantilizing associations between birth and vocality in Victorian medical discourses can therefore provide a reflexive way to access—and to voice—a new reading of imperial anxieties about colonial reproduction.11 In many parts of Africa today, as Gavin Steingo has shown, antenatal care is an inherently auditory process, from aural approaches to midwifery to the sonic environments of antenatal care.12 Such associations between Black female reproduction and aurality have been around in Western culture for a long time.13 Victorian descriptions of Black reproductive sound, indeed, tap into evolutionary fantasies about African "savagery" and "primitivism" as being inherently vocalic. As Bennett Zon has discussed, evolutionary theories of music in nineteenth-century Britain drew parallels between concepts of the "savage" and embryonic states of evolution: nineteenth-century music was therefore characterized in racial and imperial terms, from "primitive" scales to "civilized" musical forms.14 As I argue below, "savage sound," in a Victorian imperial mindset, was inherently [End Page 103] linked to the idea of colonial reproduction. If Black female reproductive sound was a reflection of primitive states of evolution, then exoticized utterances like...