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Audre Lorde, Sound Theorist: Register, Silence, Vibrato, Timbre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2024

Alex Ullman
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Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the embodied speaking voice of Audre Lorde over the span of nearly two decades publicly performing her poems aloud. Drawing from interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze archival recordings from across Lorde's performance history, I argue that Lorde developed a series of vocal techniques—shifting vocal registers, demanding silence from her audience, singing with vibrato, and performing with a communal timbre—that distinguish her from her contemporaries in the Black Arts movement. Lorde's vocal practice was anchored in the aesthetics of the black church but also deeply fashioned by her queerness, a combination that challenged the default heterosexuality within normative genealogies of black sound. Though Lorde's essays are central to affect theory and her poetic voice is often described as polyvocal, I argue that the material aspects of Lorde's poetic performance practice situate her as a prescient theorist of sound and affect.

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Type
Essay
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PMLA , Volume 139 , Issue 3 , May 2024 , pp. 403 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

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