Sonorous Passages: Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary

In Sonorous Passages, Meina Yates-Richard demonstrates how, within Black Atlantic literary and cultural productions, the sounds of Black maternal figures function as mediators of liberatory thought. Under the press of chattel slavery, Black mothers were discursively rendered as points of passage between freedom and unfreedom in the political imaginary, creating a paradigm wherein Black male subjects came to be imagined as the appropriate heirs and subjects of freedom. Sonorous Passages offers the methodology of “double-listening” as a Black feminist interpretive heuristic through which we are to hear and assess the Black maternal sonority within Black Atlantic textual and sonic objects. Through works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s nineteenth-century writings to twenty-first-century literary and sonic art, Sonorous Passages traces how Black maternal figures are conceptually excised from the imaginative realms of Black political freedom, even as the soundings of Black mothers provide protective and generative sites for developing liberatory thought. As Yates-Richard shows, by listening closely to Black maternal sonority, we can access, resound, and reproduce resonant maternal inheritances of freedom.