Voice Might Discover Him
Representations and Failures of Voice in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7914477 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Diego Millan (Washington and Lee University), Diego Rativa Millan (Washington and Lee University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 46-69 |
| Publication date | 2020-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlaa017 |
| OpenAlex | W3024910160 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 28 |
This article takes up the representation of voice in Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends to examine the relationship between Blackness, aurality, and text. Doing so requires an approach tuned to the novel's aural-linguistic dimensions that acknowledges that a character's speaking produces a diegetic sound and that the way characters interact with one another relies, in part, on how each perceives another's voice. It also means looking for how a text conveys a sense of sound both through techniques such as italics and capitalization and through instances of overt narration. Specifically, moments of mistaken identity pivot on the disruption of one character's accumulated presumptions concerning the sound of another character's voice and highlight how sound and listening reinforce processes of racialization, a dynamic Jennifer Lynn Stoever identifies through her work on the sonic color line. Instances of vocalization—moments when characters are depicted speaking and when the text itself performs vocality—defamiliarize social formations along the sonic color line long enough for the novel to scrutinize their underlying premises. Scenes in which characters' voices escape their assumed meaning trouble constructions of racial identity, particularly whiteness and its assumed control over speech. The Garies and Their Friends thus generates an alternative mode through which to critique the safeguarding of whiteness. Ultimately, the novel brings together overlapping meanings of voice, such as physiologically produced acoustic sounds and distinctive literary or authorial decisions, as a meditation on the interplay between voice and writing
Active listening · Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics) · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Politics · Representation (politics) · Sociology · Communication · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology
To tell a free story
The Afro-American novel and its tradition
The poetics of imperialism
In the break
Bodies in Dissent
Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s
Sonic Bodies
Love and Theft
The Amalgamation Waltz
The Garies and their Friends
The Sounds of Slavery
Phonographies
The Property of Blackness
Boston Garrisonians and the Problem of Frederick Douglass
Talking the Talk
Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel
Conjugal Union
"Remaking Black Motherhood in Frank J. Webb's "The Garies and Their Friends
The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance
The Breach between Douglass and Garrison
Abolitionism's Resonant Bodies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |