Elijah S. Levine

My research focuses on sound in black cultural and literary production between the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the middle of the 1980s. I’m interested in how sound was mobilized to convey divergent ideas of blackness following the unfulfilled promises of the Civil Rights Movement and shifting material conditions often generalized under the term deindustrialization. What do these productions – which often blur distinctions between popular and vernacular, political and commercial – tell us about the dynamic nature of blackness in (post)modernity as well as the ontology of sound itself?