Voice is defined here, in part, by way of Kamau Brathwaite’s “nation language,” as a black nationalist strategy and a liberatory poetics, where “sound explosions” may form part of a distinctive interplay between reported speech, silence, bodily contortion, and inarticulate sound (Brathwaite 13). Just as “(Neo)Slave narratives emerge from the combative discourse of the captive as well as the controlling discourse of the ‘master’ state,” what I call “voice” emerges against the dominance of what Toni Morrison identifies as a “statist language” which is “censored and censoring cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences” (James xxii Morrison). Each of these texts makes acute commentary upon conditions of state surveillance and the policing of the black body in ways that bear comparison with the practice of narrative “framing” that historically formed the site of the slave narrative’s production. I read these texts as contemporary variants upon the neo-slave narrative.
I discuss Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995), hip hop/spoken word piece “Return to Innocence Lost” (1999) by The Roots featuring Ursula Rucker, and Louis Theroux’s television documentary Law and Disorder in Philadelphia (2008). This essay explores the role of voice and embodiment in the claim to citizenship made in contemporary narratives addressing conditions of state surveillance in urban America.
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