The introduction to "The Politics of Recorded Sound," this special issue of Social Text, lays out the unifying mission of the diverse essays: to study sound recording within a wide-ranging, historicized understanding of mediation as a process embedded within networks of power. A significant objective is to bring attention to the ways modalities of social difference, such as race, gender, class, and ability, structure the practices of making and listening to recordings as well as the manners in which we think about those practices. Another purpose is to implode the ultimately ahistorical narrative of sound-recording technology as driven by ever-improving "fidelity" in the reproduction of music. The introduction also explores the diverse ways in which sound recording plays a part in contemporary life and argues that each of these is centrally shaped by politics of corporeality, economics, or culture.»

This essay examines 1890s commercial audio recordings--none of which is known to exist today--that reenacted lynchings of African Americans,in particular, the mass spectacle lynching of Henry Smith of Paris, Texas, in 1893. Despite rumors that the recordings were made live, they were in fact examples of an early, nonmusical genre in commercial phonography known as the "descriptive specialty," which often involved studio reenactments of current events. Like other descriptive specialties, these recordings were meant to exhibit the phonographic medium to capture audience attention. Using descriptions of the recordings from period documents, the essay argues that there was a specific confluence between lynching reenactments and the notion of a "phonographic voice," between sounds elicited from persons on the edge of "the human" and the sound imagined to come from the machine itself. It places the recordings in the context of contemporary representations of blackness in phonography and ponders their place in the longer history of recorded sounds of blackness. It also argues against the fixation on disembodiment among some media historians and theorists who work on phonography and contemporaneous technologies.»

Under Review:

Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

I began reading these two elegantly composed, deftly researched studies around the same time, with absolutely no sense that they might speak to one another. But despite the vast difference of their subjects, they form fascinating bookends to the history of American music in the 20th century. David Suisman's Selling Sounds shows how the music industry taught Americans to understand recorded music as a commodity. On the other side of the century, we have Arthur Russell, the composer and musician whose work and life are given deservedly serious, thoughtful treatment Tim Lawrence's excellent biography. »

This essay examines contemporary lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) activism in the light of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's important SOCIAL TEXT piece from 1991, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay." It revisits the restrictive views of gender that she discovered in the psychotherapeutic professions via current (2008-2009) controversies over the authors chosen to write the entry "Gender Identity Disorder" in the forthcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). It argues that the priorities of current LGBT activism, centered largely on same-sex marriage, indicate a shift away from the deeply antinormative strain of queer politics, a move that threatens to isolate lesbian and gay activists from transgender activists.»