Organizer and Chair: Amanda Weidman, Bryn Mawr College

Discussant: Charles, Briggs, University of California, Berkeley

While modernity has generally been theorized as dominated by visuality, recent scholarship in history, anthropology, and technology studies has suggested that regimes of aurality, orality, and the voice are central to the creation of modern subjects and epistemologies. This panel explores the possibilities of historically informed ethnography to show how discourses and practices of voice have emerged in the context of colonial and nationalist projects in South and East Asia. Collectively we aim to begin a discussion of how the voice has figured within Asian modernities. The individual papers explore the problem of voice by focusing on the emergence of particular dispositions toward language and music. We are concerned specifically with language ideologies, practices and conventions of public speaking, notions of the ideal or "natural" voice, and the identification of particular voice types or speech registers with particular subjects. We seek to understand: --how particular ideas about the voice and ways of using the voice come to be naturalized; --the kinds of subjects that are enabled by certain discourses about the voice; --how practices of voice serve as an embodied and performed mode of discipline through which subjects are produced; --how technologies of dissemination, such as print, radio, sound recording play a role in naturalizing ideas about the voice; --how ideologies of voice affect the kinds of voices that become audible in the public sphere; --the practices and politics that such discourses/ideologies both enable and silence.

Amanda Weidman, Bryn Mawr College

In early 20th-century South India, a new role became acceptable for respectable "family" women: that of singer on the classical music stage. Along with, and enabling, the emergence of these women as performers and public figures came a particular politics of voice which included ideas about what constituted a "natural" or "true" voice, the relationship between the voice and the body, and the relationship between the singing voice and the speaking voice. By mid-century, an interiorized notion of voice that privileged "meaning" and "naturalness" over "cleverness" and "acrobatics" was dominant; the idea of a voice that came "naturally" from within, unmediated by physical performance of any kind, a voice that seemed to transcend its body, was valued as the authentic voice of South Indian classical [Karnatic] music. The female voice, constructed thus, came to be central to the idea of South Indian music as a high cultural art form that could stand as representative of uncolonized Indianness both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, female playback singers for South Indian popular cinema became, in a sense, the foils for these respectable classical singers. Playback singing, where a singer provides a voice for an actor or actress’ character, is a pervasive feature of Indian films; it provides a means of thinking about the culturally constructed ways in which voices come to be embodied. This paper will thus explore the role of nationalism, notions of femininity, and technologies of sound reproduction in the naturalization of a particular ideology of voice.

Bernard Bate, Yale University

In this paper I will explore the emergence of a public Tamil articulated by a new oratorical voice in late 19th and 20th century Tamil Nadu. The oratorical situation is a ritual model – an indexical icon – of broader elements of sociality as participants understand them. Who hails, and who are hailed, what are the qualities of these individual and collective entities, and how are they related? These are all embodied in the material praxis of the oratorical moment. For the purposes of this presentation, I will consider how it became possible for higher status beings to address audiences in Tamil and how hearing the ruler's voice violated the communicative habitus of powerful persons (e.g. kings, headmen). For higher status persons to begin to speak at all to audiences (a practice previously reserved for actors, poets, women, and other lower-status beings) required a transformation in how status would be embodied and evaluated. It required a transformation in the personal qualities of the ruler, especially in terms of energy and activity displayed before subordinates. This exercise brings to light the ways that material genres of communicative praxis involve the embodiment of culturally and historically contingent understandings of self, person, and social order which are, themselves, intimately associated with the kinds of phenomenological realms within which people act.

Miyako Inoue, Stanford University

This paper will explore the role of stenographic systems in building modern public spheres in late nineteenth century Japan. Stenography is a technique which promises to enable one to transcribe audible human voice into writing in the real-time speed at which it is uttered. Introduced in the 1870s from the United States, stenographic systems for Japanese language were quickly developed by Japanese entrepreneurs, and professional stenographers were brought into the Diet and the court both as a recorder and a witness of the newly emerging state public spheres. Stenographers aspired to simulate the new (and originating in the west) technologies of reproduction, including photography, the phonograph, and cinematography, and Japanese intellectuals initially called stenography "the photographing method of speech." And just as machine technologies of reproduction, what stenography attempted to record was not only the referential content of the past event, but, more importantly, its indexicality, or the very contingency and temporality of the event. This paper will show how this particular mode of recording contributed in constituting the nation state. Beyond the stenographer as an actual person, this paper will also consider him as a type of the epitomized figure of modernity uniquely situated at the turn of the last century in Japan. Unlike the flâneur, a visually captivated spectator of the modern mass culture on the street, the stenographer was a passionate overhearer of the voice of modernity, whose experience enables us to develop a critical epistemic stance towards the Japanese experience of the modern.

Lisa Mitchell, University of Notre Dame

In 1913, Gidugu Venkata Ramamurthy wrote that "Reforming the modern language on the basis of old grammar and modern vocabulary is like putting into the skull of a mummy the brains and eyeballs of a living body and hoping to make it think and see." His statement, emphasizing, as it does, thinking and seeing over hearing and speaking, reflects a central irony within the movement to reform written Telugu that emerged in southern India at the beginning of the twentieth century. Advocates of "modern" Telugu sought to make the written language more closely resemble what they described as "educated spoken Telugu," while at the same time condemning untranslatable features of language such as meter, rhyme, ornamentation, and wordplay. Reformers celebrated "meaning" and "knowledge of things" over "ornaments and superficial charms," sound, and "mere words," and compared older literary works which contained such well-developed aural features with public prostitutes in their capacity to "beguile people and lead them away from the path of virtue." This paper argues that at the heart of the Telugu language debate, which raged most intensely in the early decades of the twentieth century but continued in some form through the 1970s, was a displacement in understandings and expectations of language and its role within society and the newly emerging nation. In this paper I explore the anxieties produced by features of language which did not easily translate, and examine the central but unacknowledged role played by a new belief in the universal translatability of languages.