Sonic Gaze

This book argues that whiteness is not only a visual orientation; it is a way of hearing. Inspired by the understandings of race and whiteness in the existential writings of Fanon, Beauvoir, Sartre, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis, this book introduces students to the notion of the white sonic gaze.

T Storm Heter is professor of philosophy at East Stroudsburg University, where he is also director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Studies, and co-director of the Race Relations Program. He is the former president of the Sartre Society and the editor the Sartre Studies International journal. He co-edits, with LaRose T. Parris and Devin Zane Shaw, the 'Living Existentialism' book series. He is a jazz musician and enthusiast and teaches a range of music and philosophy courses, including Philosophy and Hip Hop.

Introduction: Jazz Pedagogy Chapter One: Sonic Orientations Hearing Race Through Closed Ears Whiteness is a Sonic Orientation Existential Phenomenology Visualism Studying Sound The Sonic Gaze Creolizing Listening A Woman Speaks Chapter Two: The Jazz Problem: Patterns of White Bad-Faith How Does It Feel To Be a White Sonic Problem? White Minstrel Listening White Savior Listening White Hipster Listening White Revivalist Listening White Colorblind Listening Upgraded White Colorblind Listening Ecstatic Listening White Existentialism and The White Problem Listening Exercises for Chapter 2: The Jazz Problem: Patterns of White Bad Faith Listening Chapter Three: Listening to Difference: Creole Critiques of White Listening The Creolizing Phenomenology of Sidney Bechet White Revivalist Listening: Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Discovery Plantation Listening: Geography and Gender Listening in the Big House White Women's Listening The Creolizing Jazz of Edward "Kid" Ory Jazz is a Verb: The Original Creole Band Francophone Newspapers in New Orleans The Creolizing Listening of Édouard Glissant Listening Exercises for Chapter 3: Listening to Difference: Music and Creole Phenomenology Chapter Four: The Ears of a Guilty People: Africana Critiques of White Listening The Sonic Gaze in Black Existential Thought W. E. B. Du Bois Frantz Fanon Black Existential Feminist Critiques of White Listening bell hooks Harlem Renaissance Critiques of White Listening Alain Locke Zora Neale Hurston Alice Dunbar-Nelson Salem Tutt Whitney: A Voice from Black Vaudeville Listening List to Accompany Ch. 4: The Ears of a Guilty People: Africana Critiques of White Listening Afterword: Say Their Names