Black Masculine Flânerie, Urban Soundscapes, and the Voices of Nonwhite Women in Teju Cole’s Open City

Abstract

This article explores the figure of the Black masculine flaneur, highlighting the specific experiences and practices of the flâneur in relation to race and gender in a metropolitan environment. Combining social constructivist posthumanist sociolinguistics (Pennycook 2018), Black studies (Glissant 1989, Crawley 2017), and sound studies (Stoever 2016, LaBelle, 2010, 2018, Voegelin 2010), it problematizes the exclusive role of visuality in the construction of otherness and combines semiotic (Kandiah 1998) and sonic (re)constructions. Drawing on the Butlerian concept of performativity, this article argues that (re)construction indicates the creative activity of speakers in the reinvestments of ideological meanings in a given society. More specifically, this paper focuses on the sonic constitution of the figure of the Black flâneur in the novel Open City by the contemporary Nigerian-American writer, Teju Cole. The essay seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How do musical, verbal, and other sonic elements function as indexes of trauma, namely the racist and patriarchal colonization and rape of Native American and Rwandan genocide? (2) How do sound and space meet at the crossroads of race and gender and what can these relationships reveal about the acoustic and socio-social relationships of urban sites and subjects? (3) How does the relationship of the Black flâneur to different female characters and forms of expression are articulated by different musical forms, sounds, noises, speeches and silence?