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ABSTRACT
In this essay, I follow sound across hegemonic geopolitical boundaries to map its place-making force in the emergence of new forms of nationhood. Through an analysis of Mabel and Robert F. William’s radio show, Radio Free Dixie, I argue that racialized Southern culture was respatialized and reimagined, positioning the Black Belt as a Black nation where citizenship is rooted in self-determination. This analysis demonstrates that utilizing sonic rhetorics as a mode through which to uncover Black geographies offers insight into practices of nation building that diverge from existing forms of Westphalian sovereignty that manifest as colonial and racialized domination.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Robert F. Williams, “Radio Free Dixie.” Robert F. Williams Collection (“Radio Free Dixie” Broadcasts 1962–1966, Box 5). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. An earlier version of this manuscript was a chapter of the author’s dissertation, defended in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas A&M University in December 2020.
2 Williams, “Radio Free Dixie.”
3 Ibid. See also, Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
4 Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 288.
5 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xi.
6 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xi.
7 Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, Remapping Sound Studies (Duke University Press, 2009), 4.
8 Steingo and Sykes, Remapping Sound Studies, 4.
9 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xix.
10 Douglas Kahn, “Introduction,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (Routledge, 2012), 6.
11 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, x.
12 Westphalian nationalism refers to the modern principle in international relations that all nations have exclusive sovereignty over its own territory. Because of the colonial and imperial history of many existing nations, claims to sovereignty are often rooted in logics that conceptualize racialized and colonized people as non-citizens.
13 Robert F. Williams, Negros with Guns, ed. Marc Schleifer (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2013).
14 Williams, Negros with Guns, 88.
15 Williams was indicted on the testimony of two policemen. No court record indicates that the Stegalls ever appeared before the grand jury.
16 Williams, Negros with Guns, 92.
17 Stephen R. Davis, “The African National Congress, Its Radio, Its Allies and Exile,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009).
18 Byron Hawk, “Sound: Resonance as Rhetorical,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 315.
19 Debrah Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.
20 Jonathan W. Stone, “Listening to the Sonic Archive: Rhetoric, Representation, and Race in the Lomax Prison Recordings,” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (2015); Erin Anderson, “Toward a Resonant Material Vocality for Digital Composition,” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (2014); Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Gregory Clark, “Virtuosos and Ensembles: Rhetorical Lessons from Jass,”in The Private, the Public, and the Published, Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric, eds. Barbara Couture and Thomas Kent (Logan:Utah State Press, 2004); Greg Goodale, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (University of Illinois Press, 2011); Joshua Gunn, Greg Goodale, Mirko M. Hall and Rosa A. Eberly, “Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 5, no. 43 (2013).
21 Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium.”
22 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
23 Sterne, The Audible Past, 2.
24 Ibid.
25 Christopher Lyle Johnstone, “Greek Oratorical Settings and the Problem of the Pynx: Rethinking the Athenian Political Process,” in Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory, ed. Christopher Lyle Johnstone (Albany: Suny Press, 1996), 97–127.
26 Raka Shome, “Space Matters,” 40; Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters,” 259.
27 Heather Hayes, Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars (Palgrave Macmillian, 2016), 36.
28 Ronald Water Greene and Kevin Douglas Kuswa, “From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2012): 271–88.
29 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from “A Stirring Place”,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 5.
30 Carly S. Woods, Joshua P. Ewalt, and Sara J. Baker, “A Matter of Regionalism: Remembering Brandon Teena and Willa Cather at the Nebraska History Museum,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 99.3 (2013): 344.
31 Patricia Davis, Brandon Inabinet, Christina L. Moss, and Carolyn B. Walcott, “Decolonizing Regions,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24.1 (2021): 351.
32 Woods, Ewalt, and Baker, “A Matter of Regionalism,” 344.
33 Kundai Chirindo, “Rhetorical Places: From Classical Topologies to Prospects for Post-Westphalian Spatialities,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 128; Kundai Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 383–93.
34 Harry Haywood, “For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question,” (1958). Pamphlet retrieved from Marxists.org.
35 J. V. Stalin, Marxism and National Oppression (1913).
36 Haywood, “Negro Nation.”
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 144.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 146.
43 Frantz Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York, NY: Grove Press).
44 Fanon, “This is the Voice of Algeria.”
45 Ibid., 83.
46 Ibid., 84.
47 Davis, “The African National Congress,” 355.
48 Ross A. Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, A Collection of Studies and Documents, (CEU Press: 2010).
49 Howard H. Frederick, Cuban-American Radio Wars: Ideology in International Communication (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986), 7.
50 Frederick, Cuban-American Radio Wars, 7.
51 Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 287.
52 Robert F. Williams, “Radio Free Dixie.” Robert F. Williams Collection (“Radio Free Dixie” Broadcasts 1962–1966, Box 5). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
53 Williams, “Radio Free Dixie.”
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem (University of Illinois Press, 2003).
60 Haywood, “The Negro Nation.”
61 Robert F. Williams. “Radio Free Dixie.” Robert F. Williams Collection (“Radio Free Dixie” Broadcasts 1962–1966, Box 5). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
62 Sam Cooke, “Chain Gang,” 25 Jan 1960, Hugo and Luigi, Swing Low, 1960, record.
63 However, chain gangs were briefly revived in 1995 (starting with Alabama) during the “tough on crime” phase of American politics.
64 Lichtenstein, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progrssive South: ‘The Negro Convict is a Slave',” The Journal of Southern History 59, no. 1 (1993): 86.
65 Lichtenstein, “Good Roads,” 87.
66 Ibid., 90.
67 Robert F. Williams. “Radio Free Dixie.” Robert F. Williams Collection (“Radio Free Dixie” Broadcasts 1962–1966, Box 5). Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
68 Kerran L. Sanger, When the Spirit Says Sing!: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement (Routledge, 1995).
69 Freedom songs explicitly developed from African-American music, and in particular, hymns, see Chris Goertzen, “Freedom Songs: Helping Black Activists, Black Residents, and White Volunteers Work Together in Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the Summer of 1964,” Black Music Research Journal 36, no. 1 (2016). However, terming them “freedom songs” rhetorically removes them from the religious and racial context from which they came, instead, resituating them as a tool for a universal struggle for justice.
70 LeRoi Jones, Black Music (New York, NY: Quill, 1967). See also LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, NY: William Morrow, 1963).
71 William J. Harris, “‘How You Sound??’: Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (Columbia University Press, 2004), 313.
72 Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002), 12.
73 Tammy J. Kernodle, “Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s,” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 3 (2008): 295–317.
74 Kerbodle, 306.
75 T.V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from The Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
76 Chris Goertzen, “Freedom Songs: Helping Black Activists, Black Residents, and White Volunteers Work Together in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Summer of 1964,” Black Music Research Journal 36, no. 1 (2016): 59–85.
77 Susan J. Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination (Times Books, 1999), 17.
78 Frantz Fanon, “A Dying Colonialism,” in The Voice of Algeria (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1965), 74.
79 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 93.
80 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 6.
81 Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics”; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problem,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76; Godfried Agyeman Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US centered: Reflections on challenges and opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 484–8.