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This course thinks critically about sound, listening not only to sound recordings but to the resonances of silence, voice, and noise in literary and historical texts. How do sounds come to mean what they do? What happens when sonic concepts travel? How are the soundscapes of daily life, both past and present, structured by race, gender, class, and other social formations? How have writers and artists reconceptualized sound and music to contest hierarchies? We will study James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. Topics include the relationship of sound to built/natural environments; (de)colonization and the ‘listening ear’; global, diasporic, and local soundscapes; and technologies of sound production and listening