“It Was Like Listening to Someone Laughing Their Way Toward Death”: Black Noise, Vocal Experiments, and Sonic Silence in Chester Himes’s The Heat’s On

Abstract The article draws together sound studies and Black studies to examine Himes’s sonic inventions and interventions for imagining the persistence of Black life under conditions of extreme domination. Taking up Sharpe’s call for recognizing “insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being,” it finds that Himes’s soundscapes in The Heat’s On offer alternatives to how western sound studies theoreticians think about the relationship between sound, white supremacy, and the environment (21). The article contributes to research on the sonic modalities of resistance and domination as well as ongoing discussions about the importance of listening, specifically, the ways in which listening fosters alternative forms of relationality and spatiality. As far as the sonic subversions and experiments of Harlemites, “Black noise” emerges as something that bypasses attempts at capture, including dominant cultural norms, strategies of silencing, and raciolinguistic attitudes toward vernacular forms of Black English. Finally, the article emphasizes the link between what it terms sonic silence, embodied practices of listening and breathing where keeping breath in the Black body can be seen as a prerequisite to interconnected forms of consciousness and being.