Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World

Description

In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World. Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently 'mute' media. This book masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World. Includes 67 black and white illustrations and 16 colour plates.

Michael Gaudio is professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is author of Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minnesota, 2008).

"One of the many merits of Gaudio's bracing book is how it avoids positing sound as synonymous with speech, as a mere metaphor for how certain pictures "mean." Thus Sound, Image, Silence, in a refreshing way, moves us away from the enduring Derridian preference for difference as something written rather than heard."-CAA Reviews "With both eyes and ears in sound studies, Michael Gaudio's clairaudience brilliantly achieves, in Sound, Image, Silence, to tune in to that uncertain Atlantic passage, turning it on into a captivating journey between sight and sound."-Visual Studies "Generous in its approachability and well-suited for the early American studies classroom."-Early American Literature