Sonic Records: Listening to Afro-Atlantic Literature and Music, 1650-1860
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Sonic Records: Listening to Afro-Atlantic Literature and Music, 1650-1860 by Mary Caton Lingold Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Laurent Dubois ___________________________ Tsitsi Jaji ___________________________ Louise Meintjes Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 ABSTRACT Sonic Records: Listening to Afro-Atlantic Literature and Music, 1650-1860 by Mary Caton Lingold Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Laurent Dubois ___________________________ Tsitsi Jaji ___________________________ Louise Meintjes An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Mary Caton Lingold 2017 Abstract “Sonic Records” explores representations of early African diasporic musical life in literature. Rooted in an effort to recover the early history of an influential arts movement, the project also examines literature and sound as interdependent cultural spheres. Increasingly, the disciplines of literature and history have turned their attention to the Atlantic world, charting the experience of Africans living in the Americas through innovative archival interpretations and literary investigations. “Sonic Records” brings this work deeper into conversation with sound studies, a field that puts pressure on the historical privileging of textual and visual material over auditory expression. I show that scholarship on the early African diaspora and sound-based research are fitting allies; the very people whose culture and history were aggressively silenced by the violence of slavery and the print regime of the colonial archive participated in flourishing aural traditions. Black studies has a significant and long-standing tradition of scholarship on sound and music in literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the earliest eras of Atlantic slavery typically fall beyond the scope of this work, largely because of the scarcity of records from the period. This project, therefore, takes on a significant challenge: how do you tell a story about a historical phenomena for which there appears to be no archive? “Sonic Records” argues that the sounds of the past are not actually lost, rather they are recorded in the pages of literature, on the surface of instruments, and in the evocative strains of living iv musical traditions. Across four chapters, this dissertation chronicles a genealogy of early African diasporic music by drawing together diverse sources from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, including seventeenth and eighteenth-century travel narratives, nineteenth-century slave narratives, musical notation, and visual illustrations. As a literary scholar, I interpret these works by close-reading, but I also close-listen to them, a kin strategy that scholars of sound use to show how auditory expression produces cultural meaning. The first two chapters focus on representations of African and Caribbean music in seventeenth and eighteenth-century memoirs by European observers, Richard Ligon (1657), Hans Sloane (1707), and John Stedman (1796). The final two chapters turn to subsequent generations in the biographies of African-American performers, including John Marrant (1785), Solomon Northup (1853), and a singer named Tina (circa 1830). African musicians living in the new world made use of the presumption that sound is ephemeral to craft enduring performances that escaped capture while resonating across great distances. These artful productions, which took many forms across diverse societies, amounted to a significant force shaping life in the Americas alongside other well-documented intellectual genealogies. “Sonic Records” restores this legacy to intellectual history by locating the confluence of print and aural culture within the literature of the early Atlantic world. v Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to all the women in my family, and especially my mother, Margot Lingold, my late grandmother Marguerite Untermeyer, and my late great-grandmother and namesake Mary Susan Caton Lingold, known as Mamie to her friends, and Nana to me. vi Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. ix Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... x Introduction: The Sounds of Archival Silence ....................................................................... 1 Chapter One — Peculiar Animations: Listening to African Diasporic Music in Caribbean Travel Narratives .................................................................................................... 19 Travel Narratives and Atlantic Literary History ............................................................. 24 Music, Ethnography, and Natural History ....................................................................... 28 Sir Hans Sloane’s Musical Natural History ...................................................................... 31 On Musical Notation ............................................................................................................ 36 “Angola,” “Papa,” and “Koromanti:” Three Pieces to Consider ................................... 41 Stedman's Musical “Specimen” .......................................................................................... 52 Chapter Two — A True and Exact History of Atlantic Music, Or, Instruments as Recording Technology .............................................................................................................. 61 Toward a Theory of Musical Instruments as Recording Devices .................................. 67 The Theorbo and the Balafon .............................................................................................. 72 Charting African Diasporic Instruments………………………...……………………….92 Chapter Three — Talking Books: Understanding Sound in Early African-American Autobiography .......................................................................................................................... 108 Rethinking the Talking Book ............................................................................................ 110 Worlds of Sound ................................................................................................................. 115 The Slave Mark It ................................................................................................................ 128 Fiddling with Freedom ...................................................................................................... 131 vii Solomon Northup’s Acoustic Ecology ............................................................................ 139 "Going to the Great House Farm" & Sounds of Slavery……………………………….146 Chapter Four — Tina Speaks: Women’s History in Song ................................................ 155 A Curious Song ................................................................................................................... 158 Performance as Research Method .................................................................................... 166 Tina Speaks .......................................................................................................................... 172 Tina in the Archives ........................................................................................................... 177 Tina in Africa ....................................................................................................................... 184 Epilogue ..................................................................................................................................... 200 References .................................................................................................................................. 204 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 215 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Musical Notation from Sloane’s A Voyage to the Islands. ....................................... 43 Figure 2: Musical Notation from Stedman’s Narrative. ......................................................... 54 Figure 3: Musical notation from Stedman’s 1791 manuscript with my annotations. Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. .......................... 58 Figure 4: “Musical Instruments of the African Negroes" ...................................................... 94 Figure 5: Musical notation from Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave ....................................... 136 Figure 6: “Jungle Mammy Song” from The American Songbag ........................................... 159 ix Acknowledgements Above all, I wish to thank my many teachers, beginning with my public school teachers in Marshall, Texas, my many music teachers, and my professors at Trinity University.