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A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs

of political critique—a point that Mathes reiterates is central to the overall book (136). In fact, Mathes’ primary goal in engaging Bambara’s The Salt Eaters is to reclaim the text as a work that (quite radically) privileges the acoustic sensory over the visual (149). This argument, while intriguing, feels at times aloof and even ungrounded—at least partially because, in this chapter and elsewhere, Mathes rarely seems to be arguing against any one position or context that would necessarily posit the contrary. Bambara’s writing is so narratively centered that a poetic conception of sound does not seem as immanent as Mathes would like to claim. Rather, to make this kind of sonicpoetic argument one wonders if Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, or a continued engagement with black poetry (if even prose poetry), would have better bolstered or illustrated Mathes’ point. In Imagine the Sound, then, Mathes’ main point seems to emerge—as he relates it to Fred Moten’s writing most extensively—as advocating for the centrality of the auditory as a site/cite/sight of black resistance that is often overlooked under the overwhelming preponderance of the visual. The evasion of visuality, and the at times ironic isolation of the sonic and the literary, strain against the more radical experiments that the work wants to make. To put this formally and epistemologically, Mathes’ Imagine the Sound at times runs into a problem that plagues many provocative works on sound and (experimental) music, which fall into a kind of descriptive litany of names and artists that are lost without necessarily developing a critical enough framework for their being “found.” While one cannot dismiss, and to the contrary should greatly appreciate, the at times quite obscure registry of black artists, writers and musicians Mathes brings to light for a new and continuing readership, there is good reason to desire a more rigorous context for a book that powerfully promises so much.