EVENT DETAILS

"Black Sounds and Their Fugitive Lives in Documentary Capture" with Jeramy DeCristo

The content of this talk emerges from a working chapter of Jeramy DeCristo’s book project Blackness and the Writing of Sonic Modernity, which is a critique of the founding tenants of the Western sonic avant-garde through black music. The talk engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenants of sound reproduction technology that emerged commercially at the turn of the 20th century. Between 1923-1925 Ma Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and their conflicted forms of capture and embodiment through sonic technologies. To this end, DeCristo argues that Rainey’s performances illustrate that in order to function, sonic technologies always require forms of, what he calls documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. DeCristo theorizes how reducing black art to an embodied evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological development as it emerged in the wake of the audio-visual regime of the US slave plantation.