This chapter focuses on Hughes’s friendship with the Jamaican poet and dramatist Louise Bennett throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The chapter approaches their friendship by way of letters written by Hughes to Bennett, through Hughes’s discussion of Bennett in his correspondence with other Black male diasporic writers, and by examining his discussion of Bennett’s work in a 1955 article on transnational Black migration in the Chicago Defender. While Hughes’s response to Bennett’s work, particularly his consequent laughter, alludes to his convoluted relationship to diasporic women’s writing, these sources reveal how Bennett’s Jamaican and highly gendered folk poetry influenced Hughes’s understanding of transnational Black experience and identity. In addition, by orienting Bennett’s life and work transnationally through the lens of her relationship to Hughes, the chapter also attempts to shift discourse on her folk aesthetic beyond national and domestic frames. Among other things, doing so extends the parameters through which we can interpret humor’s function in Bennett’s embodied performance of Jamaican folk culture.

This chapter situates noir soundtracks as a technology of blackness in Western modernity. With the formulation “black records,” it points up the deep transnational and technological entanglements of what we can call, following Tyler Stovall’s lead, “a new, postcolonial genre of criminality.” Tapping into contemporary research by black studies and sound studies scholars, it connects noir soundtracks with the history of technologies meant to facilitate the tracing, tracking, identification, and surveillance of people deemed marginal, criminal, or suspect in the West’s long twentieth century. The first of the chapter’s three sections, “Liner Notes,” builds from Peter Szendy’s conceptualization of the dynamics of surécoute – overhearing – in espionage films to suggest the importance of structures of listening and overhearing manifest in noir film. The “A-Side: Miles and Malle: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” focuses on Davis’s signature performance and soundtrack composition for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. “B-Side: Melville, Martial, and Solal: Deux hommes dans Manhattan” focuses on the sound and phonographies of blackness in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux hommes dans Manhattan. Built on scenes of sound recording within and without the narrative structures of the film, the chapter considers how the sonic tracing, tracking, and recording of dark or deviant bodies in noir fiction and film ushers in new modalities for thinking and feeling urban modernity, and provides an important entryway into the discussion about the “phonographic” as “a singular mode of (black) modernity” (Weheliye).