Dissonant Records

How archives obscure recorded media—and the case in favor of discovering them.

Silence is not absence. It may be perceived as meaningless, or it may not be perceived at all, but it takes up space. In Dissonant Records, Tanya Clement makes the case for spoken word audio recordings within the archives. She explains why we tend to not use these audio recordings in research, what silences exist in the cultural record, and what difference it makes when we start to listen. From recordings of the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre to Anne Sexton’s recorded therapy sessions, Clement illustrates the myriad ways in which our current use of archives precludes the use of invaluable recorded texts.

Whom, what, and how are we not studying in our cultural histories? Why, Clement asks, do audio recordings typically garner little interest? This book dissects the institutional and disciplinary blockades that discourage the use of spoken word audio recordings in research and teaching while interrogating how institutions and researchers can be selectively biased in favor of print and against the seemingly more ephemeral, time-based objects of our archives. History-making is a messy, sociotechnical process, the author explains, and our understanding of culture can only be made better when we listen more closely to the noise.Series Foreword
Preface
Introduction: Records and Resonance in the Archives
1. Amplify: Close Listening to Silencing and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
2. Distortion: Authority, Authenticity, and Agency in Recordings of Zora Neale Hurston’s Black Folk
3. Interference: Silence and the Ideal Listener in Ralph Ellison’s American Novel
4. Compression: Self-Expression and the Entelechy of Finitude in Anne Sexton’s Poem “For the Year of the Insane”
5. Reception: Conocimiento in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spirituality Recordings
Coda: Distant Listening and Resonance
Notes
References
Index“By adroitly dissecting the sonic-material aspects of African American, Native American, and other marginalized practices, Clement uncovers the silences in archival recordings of key events in their (mis)representation across a variety of political, institutional, and media contexts.”
—Veit Erlmann, Editor of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

“The practical reports in this splendid book should be studied and meditated by anyone doing any kind of literary study, especially literary studies that work with texts.”
—Jerome McGann, University Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia

“… audio matters. This is the fundamental claim of Dissonant Records, Tanya E. Clement’s important new book on sound recordings, orality, media technologies, and what is often referred to simply as the archive, a site still pulsing with the power relations that summoned its scraps into an archipelago of library file boxes.”
—Textual Cultures
Tanya E. Clement is Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. She also leads High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS).