Sound resists racial classification because bodies cannot be read from sounds

Evidence

It is significant that it is in sound (i.e., musical culture and language use) that the most profound forms of dialogue and transcultural production are to be found. The onotology of race is profoundly visual. In this sense sound is preontological in that it is impossible to read a human being’s body from the sounds that they make. The definition of “racial types” is profoundly linked to fixing the social attributes of human beings in a visual or scopic regime. But aural cultures have different registers of demarcation because they are profoundly about the learning and mastering of codes of expression, be it in the form of learning a style of musicianship or linguistic argot. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2995

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of sound as ‘preontological’ — a distinctive theoretical term distinguishing aural from visual registers of racial demarcation.
• XREF: Connects to work on race and visuality (Fanon, the scopic regime), and to the reader’s interest in how identity is inscribed on or detached from the body.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that sound is preontological because it cannot be fixed to a body is genuinely paradigm-shifting — it reframes race as fundamentally a visual epistemology and musical culture as a space where that epistemology fails.