Black Queer Cosmologies, Sonic Geographies, and Embodied Entanglement in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s <i>The Brother/Sister Plays</i>

This paper examines the sonic landscape of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s triptych The Brother/Sister Plays, particularly how sound and its absence functions in the plays to evoke and embody the simultaneous precarity and immutability of Black being, and of Black queer being specifically. By thinking through some of the many means of sonic expression which occur throughout these works (in the form of failures and gaps in language, singing and humming, and self-narration and vocal doubling, among others), I explore the linkages the plays perform between embodied experiences and archival histories of Blackness and queerness and sonicity, all of which ultimately offer ontological alternatives to more normative precepts of straightness, visuality, and whiteness. In attending to this intentional and multilateral sonicity – defined by its particular materiality and by its entanglements with dreaming, generationality, failure, embodiment, and temporal and spatial disorientation – I show how The Brother/Sister Plays make use of the world-making capabilities of sound to situate and enact a Black queer (theatrical) world.