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Sonic Reproductive Labor: Etching the Blackened Maternal Voice onto Cassettes

This talk draws on Ella Fitzgerald’s famous print advertisements and television commercials for Memorex cassette tapes during the 1970s in an effort to braid two seemingly ...

5/8/2025
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Haldeman 246
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

Full description:

This talk draws on Ella Fitzgerald’s famous print advertisements and television commercials for Memorex cassette tapes during the 1970s in an effort to braid two seemingly disparate conversations: (1) the enduring function of nostalgia in the appeal of cassettes and (2) the entwinement of nostalgia and blackened maternal flesh under slavery’s afterlives.

About the speaker:

Naima Adams (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Her dissertation, Black Obsolescence: Sex, Plastic, and the Affective Ruse of Recording Technology, grapples with contemporary attachments to things that were never meant to / required to last—analog technology and blackened life. Adams’ work has earned national fellowships through the Ford Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Point Foundation, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Imagining America, and HASTAC. Her publications appear in American Quarterly, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Oxford African American Studies Center, and Spit and Spider Press. 

For more information, contact:
IBICL
ibicl@dartmouth.edu
Permanent URL to this event: https://aaas.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=77381

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.