The history of the 20th century in the United States is a history of political disappointment—that is, of desires for a better political life that outlast the time when they might have been fulfilled. This talk traces disappointment's persistent manifestations through five key sonic scenes. Tuning to the Reconstruction-era transcriptions of songs composed in slavery (and W.E.B. Du Bois's inclusion of them in The Souls of Black Folk), the cough-ridden singing of an elderly utopian in a midcentury novella by Tillie Olsen, and a tape-recorded duet between Tracy Chapman and the queer visual artist David Wojnarowicz, among other scenes, it investigates the concerted listening and transcription practices that helped artists, writers, and activists throughout the last century make meaning out of America's ongoing disappointments.
Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is affiliated with the gender studies program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience. Marcus is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (2023, Belknap/Harvard University Press) and the punk-feminist history Girls to the Front (2010). Marcus’s writing has appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, Artforum, Bookforum, Dissent, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, Public Books, and elsewhere.
Organized by Gustavus Stadler, The William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor; Professor of English; Director of the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities. Supported by the Distinguished Visitors Program, the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, and Sonic Worlds.
