The American Revolution and its aftermath posed the greatest challenge to the institution of slavery since the first Africans landed in Jamestown. Revolutionary defenses of the natural equality of man provided ammunition for generations of men and women opposed to racial subordination while the ideological strains of the struggle sounded the death knell for slavery in Northern states and led significant numbers of Southerners to question the morality and safety of slaveholding. Most importantly, the bloody and chaotic war in the South provided an unprecedented opportunity for slaves to challenge their bondage as tens of thousands of black men and women fled to the British, the swamps, or the relative anonymity of the cities. In examining the “reconstruction” of Southern slavery in the post-Revolutionary decades, Merging social, military, and economic history, "Origins of the Old South" examines how, in the attempt to rebuild their society from the ravages of war, black and white Southerners together created the new and historically distinct slave society of the “Old South.” The first two chapters of the dissertation demonstrate how the struggle to contain the disorders of a civil war amongst half a million enslaved African-Americans transformed the Southern states—the scene of the war’s bloodiest fighting after 1778—into a crucible in which men, land, and debt melted into capital. State governments redistributed thousands of slaves and millions of acres of land to purchase supplies and raise troops from within a weary populace; the estates of many of the South’s most important planters, comprising roughly ten percent of the region’s real and personal wealth, were confiscated and sold at auction at a fraction of their value; and wartime prestige coupled with the departure of prominent loyalists allowed a legion of “new men” to come into control of the new state governments. The result was the ascendance of a new class of merchant planters, who pushed the locus of Southern development inland, and major changes in the contours of black life in the region. The remaining three chapters of the dissertation examine these twinned consequences of the Revolution over the following three decades. Chapter three follows the experience of enslaved men and women after the war, tracing their movement throughout the Atlantic World and across the boundary between slavery and freedom during the conflict. Chapter four then looks at the impact of the region's ill-fated antislavery push during and immediately after the war, while chapter five shows how early national state governments drove slavery's expansion and closed the revolutionary moment in the process.

Advances in technologies of voice profiling shed new light on questions of listening and its entanglement with antiblackness as a structuring paradigm of modernity. To contest current conceptions of listening with regards to the question of race and antiblackness while also shining light on the potentials offered by blackness, this dissertation engages listening at three distinct sites that are entangled with this modern question of voice profiling AI. In the process, this dissertation elaborates on the ethical stakes involved in listening itself. Chapter 1 excavates the way in which the ears of enslaved Black lives were ritualized. It centers an analysis of the role of the punishment of ear cropping and how this performed both a claim over slaves’ belonging and an inhibition on their freedom. Scholarship from Hebrew law aids in uncovering the meaning of the specific form of punishment. The chapter concludes by comparing the conception of slaves’ ears to Black artistic expressions such as Harriet Jacobs’s various methods of narration in Incidents of a Slave Girl and Blind Tom Wiggins’ unique use of clusters and graphic notation in Battle of Manassas, so as to demonstrate their methods of resistance and refusal to a claimed all-encompassing regime of listening. Chapter 2 engages modern notions of sound and listening. The way in which sound is theorized and engaged in modern digital technologies is entangled with the conception of what listening is and what it entails. Hermann von Helmholtz provides an axis after which sound and listening, as well as the relation between an inner world of perceptions and an outer world of sensations, has to be engaged as a question of listening as entangled in societal questions. The chapter critically elaborates alongside questions of categorical distinction in sound, such as the use of skull shapes as referents for AI listening, instrument classification systems, and the general question of the form of sound, or sound as object. The concluding Chapter 3 discusses, alongside Sylvia Wynter’s work and Roscoe Mitchell’s piece S II Examples (date) the kinds of questions we must pose in the development of modern AI listening technologies to move past antiblackness. Immanuel Kant’s theorizing of race and his influence on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification of skulls relate tomodern voice profiling AI technology directly through the question of using cranial shapes. Wynter’s work challenges both a turn to varieties that do not allow the addressing of structural antiblackness, and a continuation of claims to proper knowledge on the basis of antiblackness. Ultimately, Wynter aids us in hearing Mitchell’s continual shapeshifting practice on the saxophone as a proposal towards a refiguring of our conception of sound, listening, and us.