Why I Read What I Read: On the Exigencies of Sonic Reading Practices

DAPHNE A. BROOKS is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of three books including Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021), the winner of nine prizes and awards including the 2022 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society, the 2022 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research, the 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. A little over a decade ago and during the time when I served on the faculty of Princeton’s Department of English and (what was then) the Center for African American Studies, I was invited by the department’s undergraduate student body to participate in the inaugural English majors’ colloquium, an annual spring affair in which faculty members deliver remarks in response to a single question posed by the majors. The question that year was this: “Why do we read what we read?” The assignment was both intriguing and wholly frustrating, since I had, at that point, witnessed chronic exclusionary practices from the top down in Princeton’s English department, a unit in which I taught for a total of thirteen years, beginning in my post as an assistant faculty member and concluding as a tenured full professor. The “we” rang hollow to me since I often found myself reading with and alongside a set of students who, while drawn to African American literature (one of my primary areas of specialization), were nonetheless rarely based in the Department of English as majors. They expressed little interest in pursuing a degree in English and often articulated a discomfort with what they perceived to be the history of anti-Blackness in the discipline—as both a field of inquiry and a site of unreconstructed university sociality. My own experiences as a Black feminist studies professor at Princeton confirmed as much. Throughout my entire time at Princeton and through what amounted to over half-a-dozen times in which I taught some portion of the multicourse survey in African American literature that my former colleague Valerie Smith and I designed back in 2002, the “we” in my African American literature courses amounted to Black and brown students who largely rejected English as a path of study. This was a sentiment that surfaced in each iteration of the class when I taught it (and I once taught the survey across an entire academic year). Their reasons were varied—