Voicing Afro-Modernity: How Black Atlantic Audiobooks Speak Back

ABSTRACT With the growing prevalence of audiobooks and the growth of the recorded spoken-word industry worldwide, this article highlights the ways in which sound studies scholars and literary critics alike can reconsider the importance of the “talking book” as a key form of oral literature. In this article, we explore the audiobooks of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing – two key pieces of Black Atlantic literature in which the aesthetics of oral literature are deeply embedded and come alive as forms of new orality. We offer a method of “close listening”, drawing on the tactics of reading in sonic literary studies, and suggest through engagement with the work of scholars such as Ato Quayson, Tsitsi Jaji and others an interdiscursive approach toward “binaural” voices in African and Afrodescendant cultural production.