This essay takes W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a model of modern black temporality and cultural practice rooted in and routed through the sonic. While Souls blends together history, eulogy, sociology, personal anecdote, economics, lyricism, ethnography, fiction, and cultural criticism of black music, Du Bois's central aesthetic achievement in this epochal text appears in bars of music placed before each chapter. The way the "Sorrow Songs" are threaded throughout the text is the key to Souls's sonorous ignition. Besides the musical epigraphs, references to hearing and the "Sorrow Songs" close both the "Forethought" and "Afterthought," underpinning the manuscript both graphically—through musical notes—and in its content—through Du Bois's theorization of black music's place in U.S. and world culture. When Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 2; emphasis mine) first introduces the "Sorrow Songs" in the "Forethought," he links them directly to the souls of black folk: "Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs—some echo of haunting melody from the only American music, which welled up from black souls in the dark past." Moreover, in the "Afterthought" to Souls, Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 217) asks his readers to "Hear [his] cry," and the best way to hear the souls of black folk, as Du Bois remarks at the end of chapter 1 ("Of Our Spiritual Strivings"), is to listen to the "Sorrow Songs." Du Bois ([1903] 1989: 12) does not ask his readers to view or see the souls of black folk, but instead he writes so "that men may listen to the souls of black folk." Much in the same way that Du Bois appeals to the ear in his theory of double consciousness, this injunction to imagine blackness sonically provides a phono-graphic guidepost for reading and hearing Souls.

Contemporary critics agree that the sonic signs taken from the Western tradition of musical notation cannot form a mimetic merger with spirituals. Eric Sundquist (1993: 470), for instance, states that "the musical epigraphs are…an example of a cultural 'language' that cannot be properly interpreted, or even 'heard' at all, since it fails to correspond to the customary mapping of sounds and signs that make up the languages of the dominant (in this case white) culture." Of course, these notes were also unable to faithfully reproduce the Western classical music for which they were originally designed; for example, they cannot capture the full range of a performance of a Bach fugue, since the piece will be interpreted and performed differently depending on who plays it and when and where it is staged. As Alan Durant (1984: 98) has argued, "Notation marks an ordering of bodily movements of musical performance in addition to immediate verbal directives, and provided historically the possibility for pieces of music of a specialized, if restricted, kind of permanence. In this sense, notation was one necessary condition to take on, as composition, a temporal and aesthetic independence from particular versions and collaborations of its realization." By incorporating musical notes into his text as doubles for spirituals, Du Bois attempts to make the musical works that comprise this body independent of their performances and locations in history while also ensconcing them in new forms of contextual codependency. Instead of being placed within a particular historical framework, the spirituals now signify and stand in for a general black American future-past. Du Bois (re)defines the spirituals he employs by fusing them with Western canonical literature, rendering these songs usable and audible African American future-pasts that bridge the gap between the nineteenth century—slavery and white transcribers—and the twentieth century—the color line. Thus, the "Sorrow Songs" are severed from their origins by transmogrifying them into grooves for Du Bois's dub mix, which allows Souls to be audible and legible as the first literary sound recording (phono-graph) of sonic Afro-modernity.¹

In order to contextualize my argument about the temporalities of "sonic Afro-modernity" in Du Bois's use of the "Sorrow Songs," I turn to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ([1952] 1995) and to Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1969) as conceptual echo chambers. In Ellison's novel, history appears as a groove that indexes both the serrations found on the surface of phonograph records and those somewhat more elusive grooves in the vernacular sense of the term, while Benjamin imagines history as an uneven chain of monadic shrapnel that disjoins the putative continuum of empty, homogeneous time. Moreover, all three writers hone in on variable temporalities from the vantage point of the tradition of the oppressed, to use Benjamin's phrase, and consequently recalibrate the flows between the major and the minor, the future and the past. By reading these writings across time and space, my strategy quite intentionally goes against the grain of current historicist discourses in the U.S. academy, where "history" appears as commonsensical and determining in the last instance—if not necessarily progressive in a teleological sense. This often unarticulated and undertheorized account of historical time leaves intact a fairly staid configuration of temporal movement (if it includes motion at all) that cannot account for the discontinuities of the temporal in the work of Du Bois, Ellison, and Benjamin.