Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Sonic Overlook: Blackness between Sound and Image

Linscott, Charles P.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1438950059

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts).
Proceeding from the fact that blackness is yoked to the visual, this dissertation uncovers some of the ways in which performative, expressive, and artistic uses of sound and music can work to disquiet racializing scopic regimes or “black visuality.” Herein, I follow scholars like Paul Gilroy, Lindon Barrett, Fred Moten, and Nicole Fleetwood—the latter of whom enjoins that foreclosing the visual to blackness is self-negating. My methodology consists of extremely close analysis performed on a heterogeneous array of black cultural objects and practices that function as interconnected case studies. Specifically, Sonic Overlook examines the voice, noise and improvisation, sampling and remixing, natural and industrial soundscapes, avant-garde film and cinematic voiceover, film scores, and jazz, hip-hop, and blues. Chapter One thinks through issues of blackness and sonicity by performing an exegesis on Miles Davis and his “voice,” which comprises a variety of significatory and affective practices including, but not limited to, vocal utterances. In reading an iconic post-beating photograph along with Miles’ music and performance, I demonstrate how the use and refusal of the (black) voice assumes deep significance. Chapter Two considers William Greaves’ singular cinematic experiment, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), arguing that a seemingly oblique or “absent” engagement with blackness is foundational to the film’s overarching strategies of misdirection and leads to explicit epistemological and ontological claims about race made through sound; Symbiopsychotaxiplasm elides black visuality by not talking about blackness but by sounding it instead. Chapter Three reads a variety of objects—DJ Spooky’s The Rebirth of a Nation (2004), Black Kirby’s remix-inspired visual art, and Killer Mike and El-P’s song and video, “Reagan”—in order to establish remixing as a signal sort of conceptual mobility often connected to visual fields but that also works to disrupt racist ocular modes. Chapter Four deals with John Akomfrah’s oeuvre, which regularly engages the audiovisual in the interest of reimagining the aesthetics, epistemologies, and ontologies of African-descended peoples within and against racist cultures that have historically occluded blackness. In the end, this study demonstrates how sound works to ensure that the persistence of the visual does not promise the persistence of racist visuality.
Michael Gillespie (Committee Chair)
Robert Miklitsch (Committee Member)
Marina Peterson (Committee Member)
Akil Houston (Committee Member)
224 p.
African American Studies; American Studies; Art Criticism; Black Studies; Film Studies; Motion Pictures; Music
blackness; race; sound studies; visual culture; cinema; popular music; critical theory; ontology; Miles Davis; John Akomfrah; visuality; jazz; remix; hip hop; noise; blues; Fred Moten; Symbiopsychotaxiplasm; BAFC; film sound; Killer Mike; DJ Spooky

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Linscott, C. P. (2015). Sonic Overlook: Blackness between Sound and Image [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1438950059

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Linscott, Charles. Sonic Overlook: Blackness between Sound and Image. 2015. Ohio University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1438950059.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Linscott, Charles. "Sonic Overlook: Blackness between Sound and Image." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1438950059

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1438950059
1,028
© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.