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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Stereophonic Boundaries

  • Aaron Nyerges, University of Sydney
  • Book:
    American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination
    Published online:
    09 October 2025
    Print publication:
    23 October 2025, pp 148-182

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 explores how the literary collection adapted to audio recording to form a species of sonic cartography. I argue that Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti presented US borders in stereo, both offset from Caribbean islands and overlapping with them. Hurston’s notion of a sonic boundary is distinct from that heard by Jean Toomer, for whom folksong is a spiritual rejoinder to the violence of agricultural labor. Toomer’s swansong to Georgia’s small-town sugarcane harvest is echoed and distorted by Cuban soundscapes. Poems about cane harvest by Agustin Acosta and Nicolás Guillén document of Cuba’s rather different agricultural identity and pose toward US imperium. In these cartographies, I argue, the line demarcating continental nation from island colony is not just aquatic, but also sonic: heard in stereo, and often out of phase.