Angelou, Maya. “The Reunion.” Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amina Baraka and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Morrow, 1983, 54-58.
Maya Angelou’s “The Reunion” is set in 1958 Chicago in a jazz club. A black woman, Philomena, is playing the piano in the band when she notices a white woman, Beth Ann Baker. She recognizes Beth from her childhood and remembers how her parents worked as servants for the Baker family. With jazz music as the backdrop, the two women meet again. Their conversation is short, tense, and dominated by Beth’s tone-deaf sharing about the familial hardships brought on by her relationship with Willard, a black man. Angelou supplements the conversation with Philomena’s internal dialogue as she wrestles with the roles of race, class, and memory in her life. This piece will be used as a model for teaching the methodological strategies Njelle Hamilton explores in her work, Phonographic Memories. We will focus on moments of remembering, embodiment, genre, and fragments as they relate to sound and nostalgia.
Arthurs, Alexia. “Shirley From a Small Place”. How to Love a Jamaican. Random House Publishing Group, 2018.
Alexia Arthurs “Shirley From a Small Place”, tells the story of a famous pop star navigating between her American and Jamaican identity. Her plan is to return to her mother’s island home, thus returning to her roots. She finds comfort in the quietness of the island as opposed to the loud and busy city of New York. She finds healing in her mother’s Jamaican recipes that she yearns for her perosnal chef Meghan to master. There are many small details about her visit home to Jamaica that evokes memories of her life before she became a wealthy pop star. As Shirley hopes to escape her life in New York, her new life is all her mother Diane sees of her. The story ends with Diane’s thoughts about Shirley “… contemplating what is to become of Shirley in the same way one might listen carefully to hear the note that signals the end of a song” (Arthurs). This short story will be used in conjunction with the primary text Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel by Njelle Hamilton. Arthurs’ piece will be used in our lesson to facilitate a critical dialogue surrounding the theoretical framework presented by Hamiltion in Phonographic Memories. We will close read “Shirley From a Small Place” with Hamilton’s keys of remembering, embodiment, genre, and fragments relating to sound, place, and identity.
Hamilton, Njelle W. Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel. Rutgers University Press, 2019.
Njelle Hamilton’s 2019 monograph Phonographic Memories was the foundational text to our project. In bringing together literary studies, ethnomusicology, and neurology, Hamilton explores how contemporary Caribbean novelists have situated Caribbean music (calypso, reggae, mambo, bolero, jazz) as a site of memory and nostalgia for both individual and collective experiences. She argues that Caribbean music encodes autobiographical, cultural, and surrogate memory into a person’s physical body, and she and traces these connections through the fiction of Lawrence Scott, Oscar Hijuelo, Gwoka, Colin Channer, and Ramabai Espinet. A groundbreaking text in sound studies, Phonographic Memories insists that we listen to the sounds of those who colonialism has silenced and develops a set of ethical practices that can structure how we read, hear, and remember.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity.” Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afromodernity, Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 19–46.
Alexander G. Weheliye’s “Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity” provides a history of alternate modalities of modernity, relayed through black music and sound. His text is foundational for Hamilton, who uses his theory of phonography as a practice that combines “recorded music (phone) and writing (graph).” (Hamilton 19) According to Weheliye, examining the history of the phonograph enables us to understand how these and other technologies have “affected the production, consumption and dissemination of black popular music and vice versa.” (19-20) The text’s 20th century positioning stages for us an understanding of the ways that sonic afro-modernity developed because of these technologies, which in turn could not exist without black music and sound.
