Book Review

The Sonic Gaze: Jazz, Whiteness, and Racialized Listening by T. Storm Heter is a valuable addition to contemporary humanities scholarship that destabilizes fixed identity categories and considers how whiteness is shaped by shifting relationships to self and power.Resonating with Dylan Robinson's indigenizing understanding of settler listening as a kind of consumption that seeks selfaffirmation, as well as the work of Nina Sun Eidsheim and Jennifer Lynn Stoever on race and aurality, this text extends similar concerns by examining attitudes and responses toward the genre of jazz throughout the twentieth century.Fundamentally, Heter argues that twentieth-century jazz and its surrounding discourses demonstrate that race is constructed in part with the ears, and that one way in which people become white is through their listening practices.Heter understands white listening as a technology of colonization in which white people control listening spaces and the distinctions between music and noise, listening from a position of power while understanding that position as neutral.Drawing upon sonic and print culture throughout the twentieth century, Heter's main intervention presents a phenomenological analysis of what it has meant to listen whitely to jazz over time, followed by the proposal of an alternative listening practice, which he calls "creolized listening," that involves attending to difference, positionality, and hybridity rather than searching for cultural authenticity and rigid musical boundaries.After laying out his frameworks and major arguments in the first chapter, Heter proceeds to investigate the characteristics of white listening.From sound recordings, periodicals, and scholarship, he creates a taxonomy of six phases of white jazz listening which arose over the course of the twentieth century.Although listeners' behavior differs in each phase of white listening, they all involve rigid understandings of authenticity through which listeners are trained to investigate and problematize non-white musicians and their musical styles.The six phases of white listening which Heter coins are as follows: white minstrel listening, white savior listening, white hipster listening, white revivalist listening, white colorblind listening, and white ecstatic listening.This