Category: Lower Frequencies: African American Literature across the Sonic Colour Line

Callahan Crawford, Chloe Gandy, Megan Howarth and Kate Wilson of ENGL 471 discuss Gwendolyn Brooks’ novel, Maud Martha and tease out themes from the book found in music. The Sound of Black Life in America: Domestic Spaces and Identity in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha “What, what, am I to do with all this life?” -Gwendolyn […]

Katie Foss, Sarah O’Brien and Charlotte Parker of ENGL 471 at Queen’s University discuss James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain while illustrating songs that underscore the book’s major themes. The title of the image is “James Baldwin 2 Alan Warren” and the creator is Alan Warren. The source of the image is […]

Michael Zhang, Daniel Eum and  Matt Kehow of ENGL 471 at Queen’s University discuss the Ralph Ellison novel, The Invisible Man in this podcast. Image selected by the group is credited to It is by J. Kingston and is from https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/afamlit/?p=1205. Introduction: (Michael) Ralph Ellison, one of the most prominent black writers of the 20th […]

This podcast examines the complex life and inner monologue of Bigger Thomas in Richard Right’s 1940 novel, Native Son. This podcast uses a playlist as a vehicle through which it will circumnavigate the racially-driven marginalization that confines Bigger and the Thomas family to Chicago’s Black Belt in the 1930’s.  Contributors to this episode are Maya […]

As part of an English Seminar on African American Sound and Literature, a group of students dives into the world of Maud Martha, a short novel by the African American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks. Through a series of songs like “New York State of Mind,” and short discussions, this podcast navigates through moments of suppression and […]

In this podcast we look at how the contemporary and/or traditional music selections in our playlist help develop a collective understanding of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man as a call for activism. Our podcast discusses key themes like segregation and solidarity, invisibility as empowerment, and a focus on sound that joins our music selections with […]

This episode analyzes character development in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and focuses on the development of certain characters – Gabriel, Elizabeth, and Florence – and their development in relation to religion. What is discovered is that each character in this novel is continuously challenged as they learn to interpret the inner […]

In this episode, we score the motif of cyclicality in Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Drawing on a wide range of musical genres and periods of production, we trace the way that the structural inequalities Petry highlights in The Street persist to the present day. Contributors: Becky Bando, Kobe Holas, Paige Kedrosky, Clayton Tomlinson, and Anthea […]