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This course serves as an introduction to the field of Sound Studies and an overview of recent works of African American cultural criticism. Sound Studies methodologies provide a way to chip away at privileged discourses of knowledge. Indeed, Josh Kun argues that “studying sound helps us put an ear to ‘the audio-racial imagination,’ which refers to the aurality of racial meanings, and to sound’s role in systems and institutions of racialization and racial formation within and across the borders of the United States.” Following Kun, we will investigate various recourses to sound throughout the African American literary tradition. We will read the work of scholars and cultural critics like Jennifer Stoever, Alexander Weheliye, and Tina Campt. We will listen to everything. Traversing the sonic color line, we will develop new understandings of black aesthetics, literature, and politics.

LEARNING OUTCOMES: Graduate students who successfully complete this course should be able to:
•    Identify and understand key issues germane to African American literary and cultural productions.
•    Broadly define sound studies and understand its relationship to African American cultural productions from the nineteenth century to the present
•    Undertake a close reading of various critical interpretations of African American literature.
•    Develop critical work that engages with the field of Sound Studies and African American literary and cultural criticism