Auditory Discipline And Noise Resistance In Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison’s most celebrated work of Beloved demonstrates the political engagement of listening practices with racial oppression under slavery.Starting with the literary phenomenon of listening,this thesis,takes Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s cultural politics of listening as its main theoretical framework,revealing not only the complicity between auditory discipline and white supremacy,but also the latent forces of the black noise as subversion and salvation.The thesis first details how white people disciplined black slaves through dominant listening practices.At Sweet Home,slaveholders employed discourse to construct black animality and thus shaped black hearing.The classification of sounds was also indispensable from dominant listening practices.Through sounded exclusions,the elites heard black voice as the “noise” analogous to the meaningless animal howling that must be silenced through iron bits and spatial exclusions unless they were allowed to respond with the demands of the white people.Encountering the issue of inaudibility,the thesis then discusses how black noise becomes an important strategy for empowerment.Rather than dismissing slave songs as wild notes,black slaves placed meaning in their songs,through which they decolonized disciplinary listening and narrate the story that had been deliberately erased by the white elites.Black listeners also mobilized the trope of black laughter to deconstruct aural idea of black animality and thus attack dominant listening practices.The last section interpreted how black religious ceremony challenged disciplinary forces of listening.Morrison proposed that if the freed slaves desired to relieve the impacts of aural discipline,they must return to their oral theological ceremony and establish a reciprocal community for survival.