Questions in Black sound and sonic geographies

American Association of Geography

Panel Presentation

What are the spatial contours of black sound? What are some iterations, notes, scripts, or possibilities within the emerging field of black sonic ecologies and black sonic geographies? How can one detect or follow a “black sense of place” (McKittrick 2011)? What is being listened to and what is being heard? What have you been taught or teaching yourself to hear? 

What do you consider noise? Who and what hears black sound as a nuisance? What does noise, nuisance generate? 

“We are here to begin to achieve the American Revolution.” 

– James Baldwin, Foley Square, 1963

Did Baldwin mean it? Do we, who take him down from the shelf, mean it? What would it mean to pick up the idea again, with or against Baldwin? Is it too late, for America, for revolution, for both? Or is the time now finally ripe? 

For the American Studies Association convention in Chicago in 2026, James Baldwin Review invites proposals for a roundtable that takes this starting point as an occasion to leap into the unknown.  

Please send abstracts of 250 words to jbr@wustl.edu by February 20, 2026. 

In “Thoughts on Late Style,” Edward Said describes how an artist’s late works 

cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. The late works are about ‘lost totality’, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic.

 The late works of James Baldwin have often been dismissed as evidence of decadence, of their maker’s exhaustion after too many years of activism, as a crude failure to synthesize his fiction and nonfiction, the novels too political, the essays too aesthetic. Yet this supposedly weak synthesis rhymes with Said’s meditations on the irresolution typical of an artist’s late works. 

Edited Volume

Call for Contributions