Sign in to use this feature.

Years

Between: -

Subjects

remove_circle_outline

Journals

Article Types

Countries / Regions

Search Results (1)

Search Parameters:
Keywords = Charles W. Chesnutt

Order results
Result details
Results per page
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
11 pages, 276 KiB  
Article
“Befo’ de Wah”: Sounding Out Ill-Legibility in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories
by Cameron MacDonald
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 137; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060137 - 31 Oct 2022
Viewed by 2203
Abstract
In 1969, blues guitarist Earl Hooker released Two Bugs and a Roach, solidifying him as a pioneer of the wah-wah technique. Before the wah-wah pedal, however, there was Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories, a collection of frame narratives that recollect plantation [...] Read more.
In 1969, blues guitarist Earl Hooker released Two Bugs and a Roach, solidifying him as a pioneer of the wah-wah technique. Before the wah-wah pedal, however, there was Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories, a collection of frame narratives that recollect plantation life “befo’ de wah”. In this essay, I insist the slide, slip, and compressions of Hooker’s wah-wah voicings find resonance in Chesnutt’s own linguistic play, through which the sonics of Julius’ sociolect texture the text towards speculative spellings, grammars, and meanings that query the logics of white, Enlightenment rationality and its hegemonic conceptions of space, time, value, and subjecthood. In listening to the tales’ resonances with the “wah”, I suggest Chesnutt articulates the “ill-legibility” of plantation existence and its echoes into and out from the present, as evidenced by Hooker’s own disproportionate susceptibility to and lifelong struggle with tuberculosis. In doing so, Julius’ storytelling makes legible modes of survival that attune to how Black bodies persist via the (un)sound logics of illness, slavery, and sonority. Overall, I argue Chesnutt amplifies modes of existence that emerge from the distinct spatio-temporality of the plantation, thus re-forming with and through the ills of slavery and persisting against rational legibility, capital production, and normativity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sound Studies in African American Literature and Culture)
Back to TopTop