Over three sessions, we’ll cover select chapters from Brooks’s prize-winning study. The Liner Notes reading group is open to readers outside of the CCA seminar—Brooks is a much admired academic—-but the chapter selections were made with the CCA seminar in mind.

December 15, 1pm - 2:15: Chapter One — “Toward a Black Feminist Intellectual Tradition in Sound”

January 5, 1pm - 2:15: Chapters Two and Four — “‘Sister, Can You Line It Out?’: Zora Neale Hurston Notes the Sound” and “Thrice Militant Music Criticism: Ellen Willis & Lorraine Hansberry’s What Might Be”

January 19, 1pm - 2:15: Chapters Six and Eight — “‘If You Should Lose Me’: Of Trunks & Record Shops & Black Girl Ephemera” and “‘Slow Fade to Black’: Black Women Archivists Remix the Sounds”

Chapter selections available here. 

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR; Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005) and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University, February 2021).

Brooks has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture, such as “‘Loud Dreaming’ with Toni Morrison and Cecile McLorin Salvant” in Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces; “Sister, Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. She is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. Her liner notes essays for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times deluxe box set and Omnivore Records reissues of Nina Simone’s early releases on Bethlehem were published in 2020 and 2021, respectively.