Within Earshot of Africa-Meditations on The Sound of Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID4195310
AuthorsTsitsi Jaji (0000-0003-3484-5784, corresponding author), Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Year2018
Volume22
Issue1
Pages159-171
Publication date2018-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSmall Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1534-6714 • E-ISSN: 0799-0537
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/07990537-4379032
OpenAlexW2795765169
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited2

This essay takes its cue from Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Chude-Sokei’s specific Caribbean matrix of technologically oriented poetics of the human is extended to African and African American texts, illustrating how blackness registers across distinctive histories. Following Chude-Sokei’s engagement with Sylvia Wynter, the essay begins with the centrality of women’s engagements with technologies for mobility featured in African popular print magazines in the era of independence. Turning to a contemporaneous publication, Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama, the essay then examines media and transportation technologies as vehicles for transnational black solidarity and its attendant static, a form of Glissantian opacity. The essay closes with a comparative reading of Aimé Césaire and Gwendolyn Brooks, proposing parallels in the way their poetics of blackness formed a “miraculous weapon.” The essay demonstrates that solidarity and dissent need not be mutually exclusive and that poetics maintains space for complexity

Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora · Dissent · Literature · Media studies · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Tools

Open DOI