Thinking with an Accent

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Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.

Pooja Rangan is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Amherst College and author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary.

Akshya Saxena is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University.

Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College and author of Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema.

"There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, yet theories of voice ranging from philosophy to media studies to machine learning still treat accents as the exception rather than the rule. Thinking with an Accent teaches us how to begin from accented voices and provides a panoply of tools for imagining, working with, building on, analyzing, and desiring accents."—Jonathan Sterne, author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment

"Thinking with an Accent is a creative and ambitious multidisciplinary collection of essays that clearly captures the academic and popular zeitgeist about race, listening, and power. Together, these essays advance our theoretical understandings of accent as methodology, accent as epistemology, and accent, in general, as a multifaceted cultural source of wealth. Thinking with an Accent encourages scholars and the public alike to reconsider our own accented lives and how they work to structure our social, digital, and literary worlds. I already consider it to be an essential book."—Dolores Inés Casillas, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy

"This book teaches us that the accent must be understood not as an ontological reality but as a co-constituted happening between bodies, people, objects, and space. The result is that the reader learns to think freely about accent, and accent becomes something to think with, not just to study. Straightforward, well argued, and a pleasure to read."—Kareem Khubchandani, author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife

"This is, without a doubt, a very timely study, given how accent increasingly intersects with migration policy, employment, culture, digital technologies, and (identity) politics. The chapters illustrate the complexities of accent, at both personal and structural levels, and testify to accent's role in negotiations of power and desire. The collection does very important work and is likely to set an important agenda for how accent is studied and taught in the future."—Jennifer O'Meara, author of Women's Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Meme

"This work is fascinating and extremely valuable, brought to life through multiple case studies and contexts. The collection gives space to difference, alterity, intersectionality, and marginalization through nuanced thinking that also works to question and destabilize subject positions, labels, and constructs."—Tessa Dwyer, author of Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation