POSTMODERN CULTURE

Zeynep Bulut is a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. Her most recent publication, “Singing and a song: The Intimate Difference in Susan Philipsz’s Lowlands,” appeared in the volume Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her monograph, Skin-Voice: Contemporary Music Between Speech and Language (in progress), examines the […]

Alex Porco (bio) UNC-Wilmington porcoa@uncw.edu   A review of Ken Babstock, On Malice, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014.   Over the last few years, a great evil has been descending over our world . . . – Stephen Harper (qtd. in Chase and Leblanc)   The Canadian Prime Minister made his observation on January 30, […]

Yeonhaun Kang (bio) University of Florida yhkang21@ufl.edu   A review of Allison Carruth, Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.   In October 2004, the first Terra Madre conference, an international network of food communities, was held in Turin, Italy, bringing together 5,000 small-scale food producers, chefs, […]

Ian Balfour (bio) York University ibalfour@yorku.ca   A review of Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. New York: Verso, 2013. It’s something of an accident that Jacques Rancière did not become a household name much earlier in the English-speaking world of theory and criticism. Though he took part in and wrote for Louis Althusser’s project Reading Capital in the late […]

Annette Schlichter (bio) University of California, Irvine aschlich@uci.edu   Abstract This essay uses the popular vocal pedagogy of voice teacher Kristin Linklater as a paradigmatic example to interpret the discourse-practices of voice training within a Foucauldian framework as a form of subjectivation in contemporary US culture. In Schlichter’s cultural analysis, complemented by participatory research, voice […]

Caitlin Marshall (bio) University of California, Berkeley caitlinmarshall@berkeley.edu   Abstract QuietBob97 is an alaryngeal speaker who foregrounds prosthetic voices in a series of sound-only YouTube videos. With performances designed to retrain a listener’s ear for different voices, QuietBob aspires to dismantle the stigma of un-naturalness that places the humanness of his voice (and his self) […]

Katherine Kinney (bio) University of California, Riverside katherine.kinney@ucr.edu   Abstract Like the material voice, film acting has long been rendered abstract and disembodied, eclipsed by the privileging of the visual over the aural and language over speech in film studies. Attention to the actor’s voice challenges these assumptions and opens new ways to understand embodiment, […]

Zeynep Bulut (bio) King’s College London zeynep.bulut@kcl.ac.uk   Abstract This article discusses the ways that experimental music and deaf performance critique the presumed limits of hearing, voice, silence, and speech. It analyzes artist and scholar Brandon LaBelle’s rendition of John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, which features an audio recording of the text read by a […]

David Kasunic (bio) Occidental College kasunic@oxy.edu   Abstract As the first death by tuberculosis on the operatic stage, Violetta’s death in Verdi’s La traviata (1853) raises questions about the origins of tubercular singing and how early audiences made sense of it. This essay finds answers to these questions in the medical, musical, and fictional literature […]

Nina Sun Eidsheim (bio) University of California, Los Angeles neidsheim@ucla.edu   Abstract Why are notions about voice and race that are no longer supported by research still reproduced? Through ethnography work on classical vocal training in southern California in the early twenty-first century, this article demonstrates that listeners—teacher and audiences—project intention and identity onto vocal […]

Annette Schlichter (bio) University of California, Irvine aschlich@uci.edu   Nina Sun Eidsheim (bio) University of California, Los Angeles neidsheim@ucla.edu   “… the voice is there to be forgotten in its materiality; only at this cost does it fill its primary function.”—Michel Chion  “Sound is a little piece of the vibrating world.”—Jonathan Sterne  Voice plays a […]

Ulka AnjariaUlka Anjaria is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (Cambridge University Press, under contract). Her articles have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Journal of South […]

Jordan Alexander Stein (bio) Fordham University jstein10@fordham.edu   Review of Michael Trask, Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Camp Sites advances the beautifully counterintuitive argument that the midcentury US university’s transition between the consensus liberalism of the 1950s and the New Left radicalism of the 1960s was […]

Russell Sbriglia (bio) University of Rochester russell.sbriglia@rochester.edu   Review of Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg, eds., Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies. Malden: Polity, 2013. At the precise midpoint of Slavoj Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject stands a trenchant critique of the contemporary “post-political” landscape. According to Žižek, postmodern post-politics doesn’t so much “merely […]

Ruth Salvaggio (bio) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill salvaggi@email.unc.edu Review of Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith:  New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. “This book is not about Katrina.  It is about Americans who have managed to survive a second-order disaster … about the effects of privatizing […]