Soundbites of racial cartographies in the Early Modern Atlantic

Bibliographic Data

ID8133993
AuthorsBonnie Gordon (University of Virginia, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume23
Issue3
Pages1-16
Publication date2026-03-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAtlantic Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1478-8810 • E-ISSN: 1740-4649
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14788810.2026.2638017
OpenAlexW7138449721
LanguageEN
References cited25

In July of 1793, John Randolph gave a sworn deposition stating that his wife woke him up when she heard a “great noise” from a group of enslaved and freed Black people beneath their window. What John Randolph heard or fantasized at his window were reverberations of a global movement ignited by the Haitian revolution and a local iteration of a sonic uprising. This essay takes Randolph’s deposition as a point of departure for listening to an early American Atlantic coast where sound and cartography cued racialized difference, behavior, and territory, and where cartography indicated sonic alterity. I listen to an assemblage of sound bites and borrowed imaginaries from roughly the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, gesturing towards the relationship between Indigeneity and Blackness, and try to untangle the sonic relationship between the practices and processes of enslavement and settler colonialism.

Atlantic World · Colonialism · Ethnic group · Race (biology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Latin American history and culture

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