UC Riverside

Unsettling the Coloniality of Voice proposes that aligning voice with sound and the human has been a central component of the colonial project of modernity. While sight and seeing have been primary sites of analysis in much critical historical work, my research historicizes how voicing and listening have served as key sites for regulating the racialized, sexualized, and gendered limits between the human and the non-human. Focusing on the North American settler context, I utilize archival methods and performance studies methodologies to analyze sound technologies, performances, installation artworks, and interactive websites. I argue that modernity’s restriction of voice to the sonic and the human has obscured what I term voicing otherwise: decolonial genealogies of voicing that are vibrational, multisensorial, and not exclusively human.

Chapter One of my dissertation examines how mid-to-late nineteenth-century vocal pedagogues and scientists linked voice and knowledge about voicing to science, modernity, and hetero-patriarchy. Using technologies to observe, transmit, and reproduce the human voice alongside technologizing language such as the vocal apparatus, they universalized a biomechanical understanding of voicing as a human activity. In Chapter Two, I analyze Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s works Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991) and Wave Sound (2017) to demonstrate sensorial connections between land and voicing; I also examine the digital echoes of these performances through their web presences. Chapter Three examines how schools for the deaf imposed a colonial definition of voice by teaching oral speech skills instead of sign language. In relation to this history, I analyze Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim’s works, including face opera ii (2013), in which a Deaf chorus use embodied and facial expressions to decenter sound’s importance to voicing, as testament to the endurance of voicing otherwise.