Soul Sounds: The Afterlife in African American Literature and Music

A timely, accessible, and empowering analysis of the afterlife, offering an important corrective to assaults on Black life, art, and cultureDespite its recurrent representation, a literal afterlife has been surprisingly neglected in Black literary and music studies. Soul Sounds addresses this gap[DKE1] by locating in spiritualist narratives, narratives by the formerly enslaved, contemporary Black poetry, and hip hop music an afterlife that is once futuristic, eternal, and temporally proximate and therefore offers us continuous access to other, possibly better, times.Combining literary studies, sound studies, time studies, Black Feminist Theory, and religious studies, it is the first book to identify and theorize an "agential afterlife" in African American literature and music from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.Considering works by Paschal Beverly Randolph, Harriet Jacobs, Ross Gay, Danez Smith, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, among others, Daylanne K.English demonstrates