Proceeding from the fact that blackness is yoked to the visual, this dissertation uncovers some of the ways in which performative, expressive, and artistic uses of sound and music can work to disquiet racializing scopic regimes or “black visuality.” Herein, I follow scholars like Paul Gilroy, Lindon Barrett, Fred Moten, and Nicole Fleetwood—the latter of whom enjoins that foreclosing the visual to blackness is self-negating. My methodology consists of extremely close analysis performed on a heterogeneous array of black cultural objects and practices that function as interconnected case studies. Specifically, Sonic Overlook examines the voice, noise and improvisation, sampling and remixing, natural and industrial soundscapes, avant-garde film and cinematic voiceover, film scores, and jazz, hip-hop, and blues. Chapter One thinks through issues of blackness and sonicity by performing an exegesis on Miles Davis and his “voice,” which comprises a variety of significatory and affective practices including, but not limited to, vocal utterances. In reading an iconic post-beating photograph along with Miles' music and performance, I demonstrate how the use and refusal of the (black) voice assumes deep significance. Chapter Two considers William Greaves' singular cinematic experiment, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), arguing that a seemingly oblique or “absent” engagement with blackness is foundational to the film's overarching strategies of misdirection and leads to explicit epistemological and ontological claims about race made through sound; Symbiopsychotaxiplasm elides black visuality by not talking about blackness but by sounding it instead. Chapter Three reads a variety of objects—DJ Spooky's The Rebirth of a Nation (2004), Black Kirby's remix-inspired visual art, and Killer Mike and El-P's song and video, “Reagan”—in order to establish remixing as a signal sort of conceptual mobility often connected to visual fields but that also works to disrupt racist ocular modes. Chap (open full item for complete abstract)

This thesis examines the complex sociocultural dynamics that surround the concept of jazz theory from two broad perspectives: formalized or academic jazz theory, which emerged as a result of the formal institutionalization of jazz in the academy, and organic or intrinsic jazz theory, which first arose from African American music-making practices. This dichotomy does not suggest that the majority of jazz community members exist at the extremes of either of these two poles. Contrarily, most musicians tend to occupy the grey area somewhere in between. The aim of this study was to shed light on the complex and elusive intersection between formalized and organic approaches to jazz theory. Through an analysis of informal, formal, and virtual (internet-based) jazz music-learning environments, the results offer a thick description of the way in which notions of "jazz theory" affected the social lives of musicians, fostered racialized jazz identities, defined community boundaries, and influenced music-making practices. The paper includes a variety of case studies, such as Miles Davis' experience studying music at Julliard, an analysis of the first methodological theory books published for jazz students and educators, online forums where jazz students discuss music theory, and ethnographic data related to modern day jazz theory that I collected from nonacademic and academic jazz learning environments. Two theory-related books examined included George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept and David Baker's Jazz Pedagogy: A Comprehensive Method of Jazz Education for Teacher and Student. In both, the cultural contexts in which the works were created and how many students and educators misinterpreted or omitted elements that reflect the tabooed subject of race were considered. The study also relied on original ethnographic content collected during a field study at a Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop, a racially charged debate between two Aebersold camp attendees, a meeting wi (open full item for complete abstract)