Sounds Across Time: Black Prophetic Soundwork and Ancestral Disruption

This essay theorizes Black prophetic soundwork as a rhetorical framework through which sonic Blackness operates prophetically—not merely as cultural expression or aesthetic resistance, but as a sacred technology of ancestral communion and communal transformation. Drawing on scholarship centered on sonic Blackness, African cosmological frameworks, and the Black prophetic tradition, the author argues that Black sound, music, and musical instruments function as prophetic vessels that transgress linear time, invoke ancestral presence, and contest the spiritual colonization enacted by white Christian hegemony. Through an analysis of Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (2024) and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), the essay demonstrates how Black prophetic soundwork enacts two defining rhetorical moves: prophetic rupture, through which sound collapses colonial temporality and makes ancestral presence experientially real, and prophetic witness, through which sound contests white Christian hegemony and affirms African spiritual traditions as living, authoritative forms of Black agency. Ultimately, the author introduces Black prophetic soundwork as an original contribution to Black rhetorical theory that expands existing scholarship on Black prophetic rhetoric into the sonic domain, offering scholars a heuristic for examining how Black sonic practices function prophetically across diverse cultural contexts.