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ABSTRACT
Colonial control is studied through a narrative sound designed to entomb a black woman’s voice under noise. Interpreting Charles Marie de La Condamine’s 1746 letter, recounting the murder of a colleague during his scientific travels through Cuenca, involves mapping the effort to quell the scandalous scream of an enslaved woman who spoke up against the traveller and went unpunished. The text is read for the concatenation of sounds that follow her scream and the way these accrue into white, order-restoring noise at the hands of the author. However, simultaneously tracking how this defiant sound travels and is inscribed through layers of noise underscores the limits of such attempts to erase a racialised voice. Examining this tangential episode in an Andean town within La Condamine’s larger Geodesic Mission (1735–45) introduces narrative silencing to the study of noise-making, wherein race thwarts the act of writing to regulate sounds during colonial encounters.
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Notes
1. Lettre will henceforth serve as the abbreviation for the Lettre a Mme. *** sur l’emeute populaire excitée en la ville de Cuenca.
2. In a study of enslavement in eighteenth-century Cuenca and its status within Quito’s legal circuit, Sherwin K. Bryant posits that “denouncing masters for gross mistreatment (servicia) and access to the sacraments were slaves’ only legally codified rights”, making formal complaints in court the only channel enslaved people had to be officially heard (Bryant Citation2008, 54).
3. Colonial punishments of enslaved people were sonically intense, such as in the case of Pascual. He was an enslaved man accused of livestock theft in Buga, a colony on the Pacific coast of Colombia, formerly part of the Real Audience of Quito. To fit the crime and deter others, the legal record from 10 November 1740, recommends placing Pascual on a donkey with a noose around his neck and having him travel to his hanging while professing his crimes “in the tone of a town crier” [“a voz de pregonero”] as a form of sonic closure by way of sonic spectacle (6 v). Causa criminal seguida de oficio contra Pascual, negro esclavo del Licenciado José Casañas, por cuatrero. 10 November 1740. Box 31, Folder 1. Criminales. Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador, Quito. On the integral use of sound in the punishment of slaves, and particularly the role of ears, see Munro (Citation2022).
4. A revised 1778 edition of the Relation abrégée, which was originally published in 1745, adds the Lettre and its illustrated plate of the uprising (Sabin Citation1877, 572). This once-separate account of upheaval in colonial Cuenca becomes physically part of the wider travel narrative as it lives on in book form.
5. For an examination of the interplay of private ideas in missives and their public impact see Téllez (Citation2018, 193).
6. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
7. What La Condamine’s frustration indicates is how the spread of noisy rumours, “the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination” (Attali Citation1985, 33). Stimulated by noise’s ability to distort colonial sounds via repetition, a new narrative of events rampantly circulates.
8. For a case study of eighteenth-century French legal transcripts and how assembly consisted of a purging or “sanitization” of colonial ideologies, see Christie, Gauvreau, and Gerber (Citation2021, 57). Kathryn Burns also speaks to the “considerable filtering and rewriting” inherent in the process of archiving legal proceedings in colonial Peru (Burns Citation2010, 93).
9. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra observes that members of the expedition “did not find in the white elites shelter from the hostility of Indians, black slaves, and mestizo plebeians” whom the French travellers considered “an unruly ‘plebe’ who, in open defiance of European decorum, carried swords with which they stabbed a servant of the expedition” (Cañizares Esguerra Citation2003, 735). Hardly considering them allies, the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies appear in La Condamine’s texts as causes of frustration or outright obstacles to the completion of his mission.
10. The comparison between her words and vomit lends itself to a reading of incomplete digestion as shorthand for the incoherence of the enslaved woman’s thoughts. Vomit’s externalisation of raw or semi-processed material remained a concern in eighteenth-century discussions of proper digestion (Takats Citation2011, 125).
11. Simon Gikandi identifies the use of strident vocal sounds as an aesthetic vehicle that undoes and transports them out of their present condition when, “against the bitter dregs of slavery, the enslaved would turn to sound (the shout) as the building block of what was denied of them: selfhood, community, and family” (Gikandi Citation2011, 236). It is a sound that dislodges the enslaver and enslaved out of their current standing by challenging the established “idiom of taste” (Gikandi Citation2011, 237).
12. Granting this kind of unrestricted travel authorisation to display Spain’s scientific rigour was part of the wider Bourbon Reforms under the queen, king, and their Secretary of State, José Patiño (Safier Citation2008, 173).
13. While enslaved people in Cuenca also had the freedom to move around within town even without official free status (Bryant Citation2008, 53), airing a complaint outside of court seems to break custom.
14. With Article 42 of the seventeenth-century Code Noir still dictating protocol for punishments across French colonies, a swift retaliation against “unruly” or “insolent” enslaved people had come to be expected. These guidelines were to be followed by slaves and “masters” alike, although they were tenuously enforced for those who punished slaves to the point of death, as administrators feared the “wrath of wealthy slaveholders in the colony” (Ramsey Citation2011, 30). Moreover, there were instances in which, despite stringent laws against insubordination, “it was still the case that the unutterable might be uttered” (Ogborn Citation2019, 4). As Bernard Moitt indicates in his study of the French Antilles, although “women were more likely to be subjected to disciplinary action than men” despite the Code Noir being “gender neutral”, they nonetheless “engaged in verbal confrontations with slaveowners and their representatives, tackled them physically, and flatly refused to work, drawing deductions of salt fish rations and suffering other penalties as a result” (Moitt Citation2001, 173–74). See Paton (Citation2001) for a qualitative assessment of the different kinds of punishments present in eighteenth-century Jamaican trials for enslaved people under English rule. For Quito’s codes governing the way black inhabitants were to interact with other enslaved people, indigenous peoples, and “free men” from 1540 onwards, see Lane (Citation2002, 250–251n70).
15. La Condamine insists that his colleague’s record is otherwise spotless, as the Lettre’s appendix sets out to prove, and any claim to the contrary, any other wrongdoing of which Seniergues was accused, misrepresents his demise [“les autres faits auxquels on l’a imputée, font ou faux, ou déguifés, ou entièrement étrangers à fon malheur”] (Citation1746, 8).
16. The Lettre nominally ascribes the responsibility for Seniergues’ death to the bishop’s lead vicar. Jiménez Crespo and his prosecution of the surgeon may be the source of noise’s filtration into the Spanish courts of Cuenca in La Condamine’s view, but he is not the sound’s source (Citation1746, 10). Noise, as featured in the letter, continues to spread at the margins of official discourse.
17. Engaging with sound on its own terms, listening to it “as itself the object to be observed instead of a vehicle for something else”, is what Chion, following Pierre Schaeffer, calls “reduced listening” (Citation2012, 50). But rather than entirely detaching sound from its context, reduced listening involves reconstructing how its meaning was conferred. This active engagement with sound asks listeners to think in reverse by listening in isolation, to “unlearn the association of the sound objects they would extract from the outside world” (Demers Citation2010, 28).
18. Ignoring noise’s cultural dynamic is a feature Novak identifies in the perfunctory way Japanoise’s aesthetic is borrowed abroad, becoming “a mirror ball of distorted perspectives that could only refract the projections of an outsider back into their own view” (Citation2013, 89).
19. According to Michael Rand Hoare (Citation[2005] 2017), peritonitis, rather than blood loss, appears to have killed Seniergues (174).
20. La Condamine indicates that accounts of the bullfight circulating in Spain and France misleadingly swap the elderly Quesada with a enslaved person that Seniergues allegedly died trying to free (Citation1746, 15).
21. See Gikandi (Citation2011, 263) for the disjuncture between what was noise for a slaveholder, yet remained a sound teeming with meaning to an enslaved person. For an overview of how the meaning of sound itself was reconfigured within the acoustic environments of slave labour camps, see (Hoffer Citation2003, 133–188; Smith, Snay, and Smith Citation2004, 365–404).
22. For a literary history of eighteenth-century comedy of manners deriving their narrative shape and confusion of information from the noisy swell of scandals, see Spacks (Citation1985).
23. While the mélange of sound waves that make white noise could be soothing in rhythmic doses (Hagood Citation2019) or used as a way to quantify and study noise (Novak Citation2015), nevertheless, white noise is understood here as the methodical compounding of sounds to drown out a black woman’s voice.
24. In Sebastián Gomez de Castilla’s witness statement, Joseph and Agustín are not mentioned by name, but simply as the black men wielding drawn swords and receiving orders from Seniergues to harm certain spectators at the bullfight (1739, 7 v). Expediente que contiene los autos formales de oficio de la Real Justicia y a instancias de los albaceas del difunto, de un Juan Seniergues, botánico y cirujano de la Compañía Francesa que con licencia de V.R.P. vino a estos lares a las observaciones astronómicas, merto en la ciudad de Cuenca a mano violenta. 2 September, 1739. Box 30, Folder 5. Criminales. Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador, Quito.
25. It even overshadows the enslaver, turning him into a tertiary figure. Diego de León barely reappears at the end of Seniergues’ life, when La Condamine mentions he was the only member of his group to have been imprisoned (Citation1746, 35–6), evoking him to highlight the colony’s lenient justice system rather than to absolve de León. Just as inconsequentially, the Lettre describes de León’s friends finding him absconding in a church and gather around him to celebrate the surgeon’s death (La Condamine Citation1746, 131).
26. Although La Condamine insists that his account “is not a matter found in a novel” [“il n’eft pas ici queftion d’un Roman”] (Citation1746, 16), focusing on the Lettre’s acoustemology reveals the writer’s hand as a sound designer who crafts historical voices into noise.
27. For an archaeological example, see Diana DiPaolo Loren’s study of indigenous colonial clothing “that produced sounds that were considered improper and unacceptable by the civilised French ear” (Citation2008, 368).
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Notes on contributors
Rodrigo Toromoreno
Rodrigo Toromoreno is an assistant professor of literature at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. His work focuses on seventeenth-century natural histories, rationalisations of race, and the colonial worlds in which these collide acoustically. He received a PhD from the University of Michigan in Romance Languages and Literatures, where he researched water’s geopolitical role in shaping chronicles about colonial Amazonia. Prior to teaching in South America, he organized Canada Reads and other country-wide literary initiatives as an associate producer at CBC/Radio-Canada.