"Political Disappointment and Its Transcriptions,” a Lecture by Sara Marcus

The history of the20th century in the United States is a history of political disappointment—of desires for a better political life that outlast the time when they might have been fulfilled—and particularly potent records can be found in transcriptive practices that mediate between sound and writing. Tracing transcriptions of persistent political desire, this talk links Ella Sheppard's Reconstruction-era arrangements of African American spirituals, W.E.B. DuBois’s deployment of such transcriptions, the politics of sound engineering on a 1970s feminist concert tour, and a fleeting collaboration between singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman and the queer artist David Wojnarowicz.I’ll argue that these transcriptive practices generate textual instabilities that archive disappointments across generations and call for attentive practices of coalitional listening.

Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is affiliated with the Gender Studies program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience. Marcus’s most recent book, Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis, was published this past May by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Her previous book, the punk-feminist history Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. Marcus's writing has appeared in publications including American Literary History, American Literature, Artforum, Bookforum, Dissent, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, and Public Books.

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