Jeremy Braddock is co-editor of two books, Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic and Directed by Allen Smithee, and is the author of Collecting as Modernist Practice, which won the Modernist Studies Association book prize in 2013. He ran the Tweed Penguin cassette label from 1987 to 1993, and published the zine Verbivore between 1994 and 1996. He is Associate Professor of English at Cornell.
“Throwing Voices”
Throwing the voice is a ventriloquist’s trick. Cast it off and it comes back strange, remade, another’s. This panel will collectively propose that this is in fact the condition of all voices. Voices are not singular, essential, and unitary but are shot through with the voice of the other, from the ones that schooled it to the ones that surround, mediate, and remake it. Voices are blood and guts made machine, instrumentalized matter suffused with other voices and other states and structures of being. We investigate some of these, from cross-racial ventriloquism to Black Pentacostal resonances to healing erotic raptures to ventriloquial reverberations of fictional voice. Hilarie Ashton reads the liminal sonic grammar of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” particularly in its recent iteration as an acoustic tribute to victims of the Paris terror attacks, as a rapturous playing with power and authority in several registers, affirming camp and sexual innuendo as part of its healing power. Ashon Crawley attends to the Black Pentacostal intensities of the Hammond B-3 organ as it resonates otherwise, activating vibrations of spirit, breath, and voice that verge on the mysterious beyond of undetected worlds. Joon Oluchi Lee contrapuntally explores the novelistic voice of Mary Gaitskill and the pop musical voice as she deploys it in order to think about her ventriloquizing of pop as a sort of fictional reverb. Eric Lott takes up the racialized ventriloquism of the Black backup singer, who enables the white male lead singer’s voice by throwing it off, breaking and entering it, thereby producing its truth. In one way or another these presentations see the pop voice as supplement of the other—other states, cultural others, other machines.