King's Vibrato

Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Maurice O. Wallace (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

368 Seiten

2022
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-1574-1 (ISBN)

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In King’s Vibrato Maurice O. Wallace explores the sonic character of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice and its power to move the world. Providing a cultural history and critical theory of the black modernist soundscapes that helped inform King’s vocal timbre, Wallace shows how the qualities of King’s voice depended on a mix of ecclesial architecture and acoustics, musical instrumentation and sound technology, audience and song. He examines the acoustical architectures of the African American churches where King spoke and the centrality of the pipe organ in these churches, offers a black feminist critique of the influence of gospel on King, and outlines how variations in natural environments and sound amplifications made each of King’s three deliveries of the “I Have a Dream” speech unique. By mapping the vocal timbre of one of the most important figures of black hope and protest in American history, Wallace presents King as the embodiment of the sound of modern black thought.

Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995, and coeditor of Pictures of Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, both also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I. Architectures of the Incantatory
1. Dying Words: The Aural Afterlife of Martin Luther King Jr. 21
2. Swinging the God Box: Modernism, Organology, and the Ebenezer Sound 43
3. The Cantor King: Reform Preaching, Cantorial Style, and Acoustic Memory in Chicago’s Black Belt 71
II. Nettie’s Nocturne
4. King’s Gospel Modernism: The Politics of Lament, the Politics of Loss 97
5. Four Women: Alberta, Coretta, Mahalia, Aretha 138
III. Technologies of Freedom
6. King’s Vibrato: Visual Oratory and the “Sound of the Photograph” 185
7. Dream Variations: “I Have a Dream” and the Sonic Politics of Race and Place 229
Epilogue. “It’s Moanin’ Time”: Black Grief and the End of Words 273
Notes 281
Bibliography 325
Index 343

Erscheinungsdatum	17.08.2022
Zusatzinfo	30 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	635 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4780-1574-8 / 1478015748
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-1574-1 / 9781478015741
Zustand	Neuware