Deployment of sonics redeploys black aesthetics and creates a performance that transcends material gratuity.

The development and transmission of these sonic and bodily scripts is central to my deconstruction of the formation of racial identity and notions of intellectual (performance) property in Blacksound’s emergence out of blackface. The amalgamation of this sonic and embodied legacy in commercial entertainment simultaneously constructs recognizable sounds of popular performance via black(face) aesthetics that are made accessible to and absorbed into the public domain.33 Blacksound also accounts for the legacy of violence that is embedded in the commercialization of popular music out of blackface performance, as black people have experienced, and continue to experience, systemic racism, while white (and other nonblack) people freely express themselves through the consumption and performance of commodified black aesthetics without carrying the burden of being black under white supremacist structures.

Tracing this aesthetic phenomenon provides insight into the way the embodiment and performance of racialized sound figures into the development of property relations and continues to resonate within the complicated, often interracial, and often racist contexts out of which popular music styles emerge. Blacksound as an analytical tool is an attempt to address George Lewis’s call for music historians to develop a nomadic Americanist musicology that challenges the discipline’s “political tendencies toward” rigidity and “fold[s] music into the vast sweep of American historiography.”35 Blacksound reveals how popular performance, from its origins in blackface and its rapid spread throughout the nation, overlaps with multiple aspects of US history, politics, and culture, while being both embodied (in performance and consumption) and commercialized through mass entertainment.

Through this concept, I also aim to develop an approach that “theorizes the outcomes” of Blacksound’s potential impact on identity and popular entertainment beyond the United States, a country with the “most extensive and influential mediascape” across the globe.36 I have created the neologism “Blacksound” as a compound noun in order to engage the material nature of the diverse sounds produced by black people—as well as the aesthetics assigned to blackness through the legacy of blackface—that are consumed in and beyond the United States. Blacksound prompts us to consider how these constructed commercial aesthetics are in dialogue with the ways in which “black sounds” produced by black people have been theorized and practiced within music, history, literary, performance, and critical race studies. -

What Blacksound contributes to 33. On “amalgamation” in racialized performance in nineteenth-century America, see Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz. 34. See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 23. 35. Lewis, “Americanist Musicology and Nomadic Noise,” 693–94. 36. Ibid., 693. Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse 791 these discourses is an analysis of the way the commercialization of popular sound and the rituals of blackface performance materialize through property and race relations. The concept is a call to shift attention to the (im)- material aspects of blackface performance that are difficult to recover when relying specifically on a recording, as blackface proliferated for decades through sheet music and live performance before commercial audio and film recordings became available in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An analysis that employs Blacksound takes seriously the “thickness” of performance—whether live, recorded, or prerecorded. This approach foregrounds the embodied production of sound through which we might examine how “intermaterial vibration can afford a better understanding of the ways in which music does what it does, and the ways in which humans use it as a force for good and bad.”37 Through “intermaterial vibration,” Nina Eidsheim provokes us to move beyond thinking of music and sound as fixed objects to thinking of them as “transferable energy” that pulsates “through and across material . . . transforming as it adapts to and takes on various material qualities.