What happens when we imagine the sonic worlds of literary texts, when we focus on voice in film, or when we study the sound of social protest? How can we integrate sound studies into our academic practices? How does sound relate to space and place? How can American studies scholars understand the link between sonic and social relations? Music, voices, noise, and silence are constitutive elements of phenomena that we as American studies scholars regularly investigate. However, in contrast to the well-established prominence of visual culture studies, sound features less prominently in our field's research—an oversight (pardon the pun!) this issue of JAAAS seeks to remedy.
This article addresses popular claims that photography has been “dematerialized” in the digital era. It engages a wide range of critical writings about photography from the early 19th to the 21st century to demonstrate that different versions of these claims have always formed an important part of photography criticism. However, rather than doing justice to photographs’ materiality or their complex entanglements with what has been considered material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, they have tended to somewhat limit our understanding of the medium’s material, sensory, and affective valences. This article argues that a sustained engagement between visual culture studies, sensory studies, and the new materialisms can help us understand more fully both analog and digital photography’s contingent position within the material world, varying sensory ideologies, and different subjectivities.
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