Timing to Descant: The Colonial Ear and Afro-Caribbean Women Writers' Decolonial Soundscapes

Abstract

Timing to Descant examines the role of sound in tactics of colonial governance and strategies of Afro-Caribbean anticolonial resistance in the twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean. British colonial authorities in the Anglophone Caribbean showed a marked interest in managing not just persons, labor, and space, but also the senses. Legislation guarding against “ noise” and “ nuisance,” and public discourses about the physical and psychological effects produced by exposure to noise became a vehicle for stigmatizing Afro-Caribbean social spaces, rituals, and uses of sound reproduction and amplification technologies (like the gramophone). However, after independence, many Anglophone Afro-Caribbean women writers, such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, and Paule Marshall, forwarded visions of a decolonized soundscape by valorizing unorthodox and occult forms of hearing and listening in their literatures. This project’s aim is twofold: 1) to elaborate how British colonial administrations used noise abatement legislation to cultivate a “ colonial ear”—a form of respectable sound perception that criminalized the Afro-Caribbean underclass, and 2) to demonstrate how Afro-Jamaican and Trinidadian women writers posed challenges to these attempts through literature with pronounced emphases on sound and hearing.