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Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity ALEXANDER WEHELIYE Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2005 304 pp.
"No Western modernity without (sonic) blackness and no blackness in the absence of modernity" (45)-in a nutshell, this is the big idea in Alexander Weheliye's new book, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Crucial to his project are a wide definition of "the sonic" within black cultural production and a belief in the central place of aurality (and/or orality) in 20th-century black culture. This is a book about the agency of black cultural producers as practitioners and innovators of Western modernity. This is also a book about the nonlinguistic power of sound, about the ability of sound to act as both "writing" (in the sense that it signifies in an abstract and systematic way) and something beyond "writing"-something more embodied and sensual. In his first chapter, Weheliye posits the phonograph as a site where the ostensibly separate categories of writing and sounding were collapsed, thus challenging the prevailing bias in Western thought towards the visual and the written.
Weheliye approaches his subject matter from the perspective of a literary or cultural critic; that is, his ideas and theoretical stances mostly build from close readings of cultural texts. Weheliye's engagement with the sounds of black cultural production (sonic Afro-modernity) owes a significant debt to Fred Moten's In the Break, in which Moten privileges the sonic and aural within black performance and develops a theory of black culture as inherently performative and...