Sugar, Sound, Speed

This essay presents the song “Area Code 869,” an example of a Caribbean genre known as “wilders” or “pep,” as a form of what Kodwo Eshun calls “sonic fiction.” By focusing on sonic bodies as “bodies touched by sound,” the essay suggests that “869” offers a reimagination of the historical relationship between sugar, sound, and speed in the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts, a former British sugar colony.

Literary Persons and Medieval Fiction in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs

Like many exegetes before him, the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux regarded the lovers in the Song of Songs as allegorical fictions. Yet these prosopopoeial figures remained of profound commentarial interest to him. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs returns again and again to the literal level of meaning, where text becomes voice and voice becomes fleshly persona. This essay argues that Bernard pursued a distinctive poetics of fictional persons modeled on the dramatic exegesis of Origen of Alexandria as well as on the Song itself. Ultimately, the essay suggests, Bernard’s Sermons form an overlooked episode in the literary history of fiction.

Fugitive Voice

This essay proposes that current-day notions of fugitivity, understood in the terms Fred Moten proposes as a category of the irregular that escapes easy representations and predications, can undiscipline music histories in productive ways. Among these: it can inflect musicological thinking through attention to sonic remainders of haunted pasts; it can decenter understandings of the aesthetic; and it can lead to more nuanced thinking about the imbrication of music in an “undercommons” of life that refuses ever to fully sound in harmony, residing instead in a disordered space of restless, noisy sound. The essay asks, finally, how such thinking, developed by Moten, Nathaniel Mackey, and Daphne Brooks, among others, can remake aspects of musicological thinking about voice.

Michel Leiris and the Secret Language of Song

Best known for his reminiscences of artistic and intellectual life in midcentury Paris and for his chronicle of the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti mission, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris also wrote obsessively about music, turning to imperfectly recalled fragments of song and opera to evoke key moments of early childhood and to explore affective relationships. This article focuses on two episodes from Leiris’s writings to demonstrate that his highly emotional and anecdotal mode of writing about music anticipates, and quite possibly influenced, the more systematic theories of voice, sound, and language of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Derrida engaged directly with Leiris in his essay “Tympan” (in The Margins of Philosophy), which quotes at length a text by Leiris on the cognitive and relational dimensions of hearing and writing. Leiris’s experience in the 1930s and 40s developing a lexicon and grammar for the ritual language of the Dogon people of Mali, I argue, fundamentally shaped his conviction that both music and language are most communicative when they permeate and destabilize each other.

Certain Loves for Opera

The attraction of objects has motivated a swerve within the humanities—a move away from texts and exegesis, linguistics, and semiotics; a move toward the body, the senses, materiality, and physiology. A musical instrument, a scientific artifact, a collection of sounds, an antique postcard: yes, all these objects are expressive and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, and in being so they can be understood to embody an epistemology, with theories and realms of knowledge written into their every contour. Or they can be understood as traces of global exchange and displacement. But what if the object is not very good, not loveable at all? Crumbling, toxic paper or banal images, with no exit from a strange historical or cultural space, perhaps an uncomfortable space to which you feel averse (or at least, feel you should disdain, as beneath contempt)? Or what if the object is misdirecting? What if it is ephemeral, like sound, something that cannot be held? These questions are woven in this essay into a reflection on the forms taken by certain loves for opera, a reflection centered on some nineteenth-century material objects that relate to act 4 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots (1836).

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

Queer Melancholia

GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, founded in 1993, offers an exemplary site for understanding the rise of queer theory, which, from the start, has struggled with the tension between institutionalization and radical resistance. By situating the emergence of this journal and queer theory in general within the AIDS crisis and the literary tradition of the elegy, this essay offers a reading of conventional academic practices as rituals of queer melancholia that comes to challenge the assumption of queer theory’s secularity.

Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, and Seraphic Devotions

Reading Henry James’s late novel The Wings of the Dove with Honoré de Balzac’s Seraphita, this essay argues that James performs through his novel an act of secular devotion, a memorialization of lost others through which he enables himself to continue to live.

“As Often as His Heart Beat, the Name Moved”

This essay considers an instance of medieval fictionality through the devotional text The Life of the Servant by the Dominican Henry Suso, specifically, through an examination of the “Servant’s” attempt to identify with Christ. Two forms of doubleness issue from this attempt, namely, the human servant seeking to embody the divine without remainder and his figuration as sinner and savior. Insofar as the text allows for a play between these polarities, the servant’s devotional practice can be understood as inhabiting the “as if,” or a kind of fictionality. The temptations of a devotional literalism—fiction striving to overcome its fictionality—is portrayed in the Life alongside a vision of devotion that retains the suspensions and play of the fictional.