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The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. By Shane White and Graham White. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Pp. xxii, 241. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 0-8070-5027-X; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-8070-5026-1.)
The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech is a lively book, full of echoes. In it, Shane White and Graham White deftly catalogue some of slavery's sounds, mostly musical and linguistic, from the mid-eighteenth century to the immediate post-bellum period. The principal arguments of the book are: the sounds of African American culture were distinctive; sounds "whose roots lay deep in the slaves' African homelands, collided with European musical and speech forms, to create something new" (p. xviii); the sounds of black culture held a shock value for whites in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, the continued strangeness-"weirdness" is the Whites' recurring term-of these sounds alienated whites from black culture; African American culture understood music "as functional, as part and parcel of the ordinary course of daily life, rather than as something abstracted from it" (p. 40); black music (and certain types of speech) was nonlinear and mixed; what whites heard as irregular and jarring (noise?), blacks heard as meaningful, vibrant, and rhythmic (sound?); and the putatively uniform sound of black speechways was increasingly parodied by whites in their ongoing construction of racial otherness.
The study's heavy emphasis on the spoken word-as the book's subtitle says, "songs, sermons, and speech"-as the principal form of sound...