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.

Meina Yates-Richard is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University.

Prologue: I Sound My Grandmother’s Voice, Listening for Freedom  ix
Introduction. Listening for Black Maternal Sonority  1
1. “Your [Memphis] Blues Ain't Like Mine”: Lynching, Maternal Sonority, and the Echoing South  13
Partita: Songs of the Native Son: Fugitive Freedom Impulses and Emergent Black Maternal Sonority  33
Soprano Obligato: Pauline Hopkins’s of One Blood and Black Maternal Sonority  48
2. “WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?”: Maternal Disavowal, Flight, and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Maternal Pain  56
3. Sounding Ephemeral Freedoms: Hearing, Not Heeding Black Women’s Cries in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  95
4. Inherited Soundscapes: Michelle Cliff’s Marketwomen and Double-Listening for Black Maternal Resonances  119
5. “Across Distances Without Recognition”: Black Maternal Sonority in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land  146
Coda. “Music of Future Worlds”: Re-Sounding Freedom  184
Acknowledgments  203
Notes  207
Bibliography  253
Index