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Imagine The Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights by Carter Mathes

2018; American studies; Volume: 57; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ams.2018.0028

2153-6856

Ajay Heble,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: Imagine The Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights by Carter Mathes Ajay Heble IMAGINE THE SOUND: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights. By Carter Mathes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015 There is a rich and vital history of African American creative practitioners who have used experimental and improvisational music to sound off against systems of fixity and oppression, to imagine alternatives to dead-end situations, and to enact other possible futures. In his engaging, critically astute, and deeply contextualized study Imagine the Sound, Carter Mathes draws on this history, on this music (particularly the music of John Coltrane and Sun Ra), to analyze the work of writers such as Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, Toni Cade Bambara, and James Baldwin to explore how the sonic functions in post-Civil Rights African American expressive culture as a force for black political resistance and radical thought. What is literary sound? How, that is, can sound be mobilized on the pages of literary texts? And how might the experimental edge, transformational energy, and critical force of the expansive sound we associate with free jazz and creative improvised music translate into literary form? Drawing, in particular, on John Coltrane's far-reaching late career innovations with "experimental sound as a productive challenge to the limitations of the American mainstream" (23), Mathes's study asks, "how can we imagine a literary genealogy of experimental African American writing that continues to assert itself through elaborations of its sonority?" (196). Mathes hears in Coltrane a foundational context for exploring and analyzing what he calls "sonic innovations in literary form" (24), innovations that constituted "aesthetic and political approaches to refashioning African American literary form during the post-Civil Rights era" (24). In his chapter on one of the leading figures in the Black Arts Movement, Larry Neal, Mathes discusses how "the shifting quality of a justly intoned sound [as opposed to more traditional tempered forms of tonal expression] begins to define part of the conceptual break that free jazz articulates against the constraints of hierarchically ordered Western musical scales" (104). Reading these sonic interventions of free jazz alongside the struggles of black nationalism, Mathes opens up resonant areas of inquiry for contextualizing and understanding Neal's work, focusing on "the politics of sound as an expressive force of black revolution" (104). Similarly, in the chapter on Toni Cade Bambara, Mathes draws attention to sound as a resistant force [End Page 119] in Bambara's fiction, reflecting her "desire to create works of art that are, in her words, 'indigestible to the imperialist system'" (145). These links among literary aesthetics, sound, experimentation, and strategies of resistance are handled throughout with exemplary care and thoughtfulness. Although there are some moments where the analysis seems to me to stray somewhat from the main line of inquiry, and while I might at times have liked to see clearer signposting of the connections between some of the key strands of the argument, this is an important book that clearly broadens the scope and extends the reach of scholarship on African American literature and black experimental music. Its readings of the soundings-off that occur in the literary works in question are insightful and compelling, and the questions opened up by the critical and political terrain it covers remain timely and pressing. Ajay Heble School of English and Theatre Studies / International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation University of Guelph, Canada Copyright © 2018 Mid-America American Studies Association