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9781609385613

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Race Sounds is a provocative and innovative meditation on listening as an interpretive, creative, and civic act that is foundational to twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature and American political culture. Furlonge's book wrestles with our most treasured writers in order to reveal how listening is both an African American literary trope and actual communal practice that provides a deeper, more intimate engagement with racial difference. Furlonge persuasively and beautifully argues that these writers demand that their audiences read, borrowing from jazz lexicon, with `big ears,' and create a new, more democratic world of readers and citizens in the process. - Salamishah Tillet, author, Sites of Slavery This book is the most sophisticated and subtle treatment of listening to the sonic dimension in African American literature we have. The profound relation of music to text in the black tradition is brought to life in a persuasive and powerful manner. Furlonge has made a major contribution to our understanding of black humanism. - Cornel West, author, Race Matters At a time when the American body politic has devolved into a set of repellant polarities, in which the disdain for voices that offer alternative ways to embody citizenship operates at a fever pitch, Race Sounds endeavors to challenge the assumption that acts of reading involve the attenuation of sound. The project's most insistent aim is to fashion a line of inquiry that seeks to alter our understanding of African American literary production as a process of mere inscription by insisting that reading is a simultaneously visual and sonic practice. - Herman Beavers, University of Pennsylvania

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Nicole Brittingham Furlonge is the director of teaching and learning and chair of the English department at Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

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