"In Sonorous Passages, Meina Yates-Richard guides readers through a practice of "doubled-listening," or "listening otherwise," attending to the ignored, muffled, and silenced women of the Black Atlantic literary tradition. Yates-Richard argues that the sounds of Black maternal figures function powerfully to communicate freedom practices amid ongoing subjection. Studying works from Frederick Douglasss nineteenth-century writings to twenty first-century literary and sonic art, Sonorous Passages traces how Black maternal figures became conceptually excised from the imaginative realms of Black political freedom, mining the paradoxical dynamic wherein Black mothers emblematize unfreedom even as their soundings provide protective and generative sites for developing liberatory thought. Sonorous Passages, through engaging works spanning the US, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Martinique, interrogates representational and political legacies of amplifying, leveraging, and then muting Black maternal figures soundings within popular Black Atlantic liberation ideologies. Yates-Richard reorients attention to these understudied soundings to excavate liberatory possibilities that exceed frameworks of flight, autonomy, and politically legislated emancipation"-- Provided by publisher.