Patrick Anderson: In the context of your current and past research, what role has sound and/or music played?

Roshanak Kheshti: Sound and music have been central to my thinking since graduate school. I began by studying film theory in an effort to think about the circulation and consumption of “national cinemas” as ethnographic texts in the U.S. independent cinema industry. But I decided to shift gears and focus more on sound as music became more central to me, since I was moonlighting as a gigging musician.

I've come to realize that considering sound through the critical genealogy of feminist or race theory forces you to move beyond sound as an object and to think of sound instead as an analytic or a hermeneutical tool for understanding inequality, racism, gender formation, desire, pleasure. Given that this has been my trajectory, I see the use of sound as a political project and an analytical means to understanding the social worlds I study in my work.

Daphne Brooks: I love the ways that your multifaceted work in both academia and as a gigging musician have informed the ways you think about sound. In many ways, my own road to this field dates back to childhood geekdom. I've had a long-standing obsession with writing about music since my teen years, when I fell in love with rock music journalism. As an adolescent young woman of color whose post–Civil Rights identity was shaped in part by wide-ranging musical tastes and subcultural aesthetics, I found that form of cultural criticism (so straight, so white, so male, so full of a particular kind of unselfconscious swagger) both exhilarating and deeply problematic. So I came of age in the '70s and '80s reading Rolling Stone magazine alongside the black feminist literature (Morrison, Walker, Naylor) that my older sister bequeathed to me, and I kept imagining and longing for ways to conjoin these two worlds, in effect to cultivate a kind of black feminist rock criticism that could critically (re)read identity politics in rock-and-roll culture and one that could recuperate all of the women buried at the bottom of the rock-and-roll archive. The book I'm working on right now emerges out of these longtime interests. At its core is the search for a “secret history” (to borrow a line from legendary rock scribe Greil Marcus) of black women and sound subcultures.

I became drawn to performance studies in graduate school because it was a field that provided me with the kinds of theoretical tools that enabled me to write about identity politics and sound and visual culture and embodiment and kinesthetic politics all at once. My work on black performance culture spans from the nineteenth century to the present day in part because I'm interested, like so many folks in our field(s), in how sound and corporeal gestures and aesthetics travel and transmogrify across time and haunt our present-day lives.

Kheshti: I am really struck by how you characterized your feelings of ambivalence toward rock music journalism, noting both your pull toward its magnetism as well as your feelings of repulsion against its attempts at speaking to any reader but you. This resonates with me so much. I think back to (what was then referred to as) the “alternative rock” I used to tune in to on 91.1 WRVU Nashville (Vanderbilt University's public radio) as a kid growing up in a highly segregated working-class neighborhood where Top 40 was king. I knew even back in the seventh grade that this was not “my people's” music, which I was able to hear at Iranian parties or at home. So while I found this incredibly white music pleasurable, I always had a sense that I was an interloper within another cultural sphere. I was strangely drawn to this music and the other worlds it signified, all the while perplexed by that attraction. It was in the music videos I saw on early MTV that I began to imagine alternative realities to the one I faced every day.

This relates directly to your statement that “I'm interested, like so many folks in our field(s), in how sound and corporeal gestures and aesthetics travel and transmogrify across time and haunt our present-day lives.” This personal experience nurtured a fascination with music (and sound more broadly) as an index for other subjects, places, and cultures. I then grew even more curious about how performers negotiate their own experiences with their performances with the unwieldy transformations in meaning and use value these performances undergo in the marketplace. So your reference to the “secret history” of black women and sound cultures is really quite exciting. While the culture industry's exploitation of black women has been widely documented, it seems that there is also a nonmarket value to black women's musical cultural production that has received less scholarly attention. The women you mention and others, such as Nina Simone, Erykah Badu, and Chaka Khan, did not always have the ubiquitous culture-industry “audience” for whom they were produced but were in fact members of subcultural communities through which they cultivated their own aesthetic voices. Countless people have of course cited the church as the landmark within that community, but in this “secret history” I can only imagine a communal formation that is not reducible to that site, one that is generative, reproductive, and formative—all necessary components enabling the performative histories that we have seen archived in History with a capital “H.”

Anderson: Is there a way we might think through your work as describing sound/music as a social space? In other words, in addition to acting as cultural production—engaged in the work of cultural description—how might we think about sound/music as also performative: active in producing the publics and counterpublics that produce and engage with it?

Kheshti: Definitely. I appreciate Murray Schafer's notion of the soundscape in thinking about how space is constituted through sound and how sound is structured as spatial precisely for this very reason. While performing ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco–based world music record company (Kinship Records) at the turn of the millennium, I realized that a significant part of the work of the U.S. world music industry is the production and distribution of the sonic experience of the space/time of others. Furthermore, I also realized and experienced that the listening subject is constituted through hearing and through sonically occupying this other space-time vis-à-vis the racialized and gendered sounds contained in world music. So not only does this hybridized world music represent various racialized-gendered others, it constitutes the cosmopolitan listening subject as well.

Brooks: I love this line: “a significant part of the work of the U.S. world music industry is the production and distribution of the sonic experience of the space/time of others.” So true! I once crashed a Princeton blues music symposium and raised this concern (i.e., the hegemonic fascination with/fetishization of temporally frozen sonic black rural cultures) and got a fair amount (an understatement!) of push-back from blues purists/aficionados. I wish that some of them had seen Ghost World (remember when Scarlett Johannson was really cool?!).

So like Roshy, a good deal of my work—both in academia and elsewhere—focuses on sound and the production and cultivation of counterpublics. When I was writing about nineteenth and early twentieth-century transatlantic black performers, I became interested in performative appropriations—or what we might even call black sonic marronage: a fugitive slave like Henry Box Brown rewriting spirituals and popular song to document and archive his own resistant odysseys, African American minstrel performers who turned coon songs inside out. These kinds of subterfuge sounds challenged and demanded of listeners counterhegemonic forms of interpreting what they heard. In this regard, I think of folks such as Brown and (black minstrelsy legend) Bert Williams as pioneers who were laying the groundwork for the kinds of black sonic counterpublics that would flourish in the century ahead. They developed spheres wherein subaltern listeners might hear and identify with modes of “blackness” that went against the grain.

There's another nineteenth-century figure I've been researching of late whose work falls into this category, likewise engages with the politics of social space in absolutely provocative ways, and that's Blind Tom. Called by some an “autistic artist,” Blind Tom possessed “heightened sensory discrimination” that in many ways defied conventional medical diagnoses. His nearly virtuosic skills as a mimic of sounds; his vast repository of social memory, sensory information, and “aural pictures”;Footnote ¹ and above all else his ability to translate and reproduce information from the world around him in spectacularly performative musical contexts both catapulted him into the realm of nineteenth-century performance show celebrity culture and simultaneously left him vulnerable to triply complex exploitation and disenfranchisement—as a slave, as a disabled musician, and as an entertainer whose (stolen) livelihood rested in part on meeting the prejudicial demands of a P. T. Barnum–influenced “freak show” circuit.

Blind Tom was a radical performative listener poised on the edges of slavery and freedom who translated liminal nineteenth-century America into embodied, phonographic spectacle. He was a mimic who absorbed and reproduced the reverberations of the world around him, thus opening up a field of (black) modernity and black avant-garde praxis that would emerge more fully in the Gilded Age. And he was a (ghostly) medium whose performative repertoire invoked the cultural aesthetics of spiritualism and magic, ultimately complicating the spatial and temporal dimensions of black cultural representation. In an age characterized by multiple forms of border crossings, Blind Tom's fugitive sonic selfhood underscores the extent to which we might better understand the politics of community and nationhood by listening to how it (re)sounded in the cultural work of black performers from that era.

His performances directly engaged with the “ephemera” of everyday life. Beyond his impeccably rendered classical music recitals, Blind Tom's performances called attention to the quotidian sounds that we are liable to overlook as history and as performances that matter. The sounds that he mimicked and recontextualized in performance “challenge[d] the traditional bounds of space and time”Footnote ² by, for instance, bringing warfare and thunderstorms indoors (he wrote and performed compositions that mimicked the sounds of warfare), by turning an instrument into a powerful locomotive (he produced the sounds of steam engines through voice and piano), and by turning himself into fiddles and bagpipes, among other things.

In addition to these really old-school performers, I've returned again and again to artists who, in my opinion, capture cultural epochs and mark generational shifts: the extraordinary sonic ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston performing and recording the 1930s rural black cultures she explored; Aretha Franklin at the age of 18 signing on to Columbia Records in the 1960s and singing (pre-“Respect”) elegant pop songs that evoked a transitional moment in civil rights integrationist politics; the late white rock vocalist Jeff Buckley developing a mid-1990s downtown NYC repertoire that captured the heterogeneity of post–civil rights cultural identity formations. In a sense, I guess I'm always returning to the ways performers—and especially performers of color—draw on their own phonographic powers to mark their own subjectivity in space and time.

Kheshti: Given that sonic performance and production has been a space of utopian longing and imagined liberation for African diasporic peoples in the context of unconscionable forms of subjugation, your work helps us hear it as a paradigmatic “subjugated knowledge” from which we still have so much to learn. You are right on when you say that “Blind Tom's fugitive sonic selfhood underscores the extent to which we might better understand the politics of community and nationhood by listening to how it (re)sounded in the cultural work of black performers from that era.” In the space of subalternity that you've mapped, we listen not so much for the subaltern subject who speaks (as we would in a slave narrative) but instead for s/he who “(re)sounds.” So although in the historical archives we find only a small handful of subalterns who literally speak in the textual format of the slave narrative (especially female slaves and postbellum female authors), this paucity is overshadowed many times over by the subalterns who “(re)sound” through history using sonic means. This is certainly not to say that the sonic is not textual but instead that the sonic circulates at a vernacular level that has the potential to subvert the logics of language.

Like you, Daphne, I am fascinated by sonic subalternity. As a musician working within the culture industry, I discovered that an artist's intentions for her music, be they semantic or the imagined community of listeners for whom one performs, are completely beyond her control. Having worked in the music industry as a musician-artist and as an ethnographer, I have redirected my fascination with subalternity to questioning how it has been instrumentalized by this industry. Riffing upon the questions you raise with your new work: it is fascinating for me to consider the incredible mass and international appeal that early blues recordings had among nonblack audiences. In this same vein, I'm currently thinking about how sonic subalternity circulates as a commodity and what kind of value it brings to listeners. According to staff and managers at Kinship Records, the value that world music is imagined to bring to its listeners is pleasurable, pedagogical, cosmopolitical, and/or spiritual—for the most part affective values that are determined less at the site of production than at the site of reception. I've concluded that world music performers are affective laborers and that this labor takes place at the site of reception, constituting a space of imaginary contact between the listener and the performer in the “aural imaginary.” The “aural imaginary” can thus be considered as a space in which subjects interact through the listening event, producing the surplus forms of affective value that keep consumers coming back for more.