This chapter traces black womanhood in Ellison’s writing to posit that he deploys a distinctly sonic figural aesthetic in his depictions black women that resounds with yet understudied meaning. Given Ellison’s stylistic attention to sound and music, interrogating the roles of black women as producers, performers, interpreters and instructors of sound and music reveals novel insights about the complex gendered dynamics of Ellison’s oeuvre. Oscillating between Invisible Man, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” and “As the Spirit Moves Mahalia,” this chapter charts the soundings of black women to theorize about their pivotal role in structuring Ellison’s most well-known works

Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South was prophetic in its formulation of a critical intersectional methodology to codify and analyze the oppressions black women confronted at the nexus of the post-Reconstruction South and nation. Framing herself as representative of region and nation and emissary of blackness and woman-ness, throughout the text Cooper locates herself and the black women for whom she speaks within complex and interchanging matrices of blackness, woman-ness, southernness, and U.S. nationalism. This chapter explores how Cooper’s intersectional critique of race, gender, region, nation, and empire is impelled by her centralization of the experiences and potential of black women in the South. Cooper’s understanding of the interlocking logics of patriarchy, racial purity, and U.S.-southern supremacy was shaped by her rejection of eugenics and sexology, pseudo-scientific ideologies which shaped thinking on race and gender – and thus on region and nation – in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Ultimately, Cooper’s critical intellectual response emphasizes and develops radical black southern mothering as the root of emancipatory social praxis.