Ordinary Oralities

Everyday Voices in History

Josephine Hoegaerts, Janice Schroeder, Josephine Hoegaerts, Janice Schroeder

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111079431
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Histories of voice are often written as accounts of greatness: great statesmen, notable rebels, grands discours, and famous exceptional speakers and singers populate our shelves. This focus on the great and exceptional has not only led to disproportionate attention to a small subset of historical actors (powerful, white, western men and the occasional token woman), but also obscures the broad range of vocal practices that have informed, co-created and given meaning to human lives and interactions in the past. For most historical actors, life did not consist of grand public speeches, but of private conversations, intimate whispers, hot gossip or interminable quarrels.

This volume suggests an extended practice of eavesdropping: rather than listening out for exceptional voices, it listens in on the more mundane aspects of vocality, including speech and song, but also less formalized shouts, hisses, noises and silences. Ranging from the Scottish highlands to China, from the bedroom to the platform, and from the 18^th until the 20^th century, contributions to this volume seek out spaces and moments that have been documented idiosyncratically or with difficulty, and where the voice and its sounds can be of particular salience. In doing so, the volume argues for a heightened attention to who speaks, and whose voices resound in history, but refuses to take the modern equation between speech and presence/representation for granted.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Ordinary Oralities: Introduction
• Becoming Kuniong: Vocal Encounter and Female Missionary Work in Gutian, China (1893–1895)
• “Good evening, you hag”: Verbalizing Unhappy Marriages in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam
• Sounding Sex: Erotic Oralities in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Archive
• George Catlin’s Shut Your Mouth, the Biopolitics of Voice, and the Problem of the “Stuttering Indian”
• Reading Olaudah Aloud: Elocution, the Commodity-Form, and Transverse Culture
• Traces of the Ordinary: The Guthrie Brothers and the Voices of Victorian “Nobodies”
• A Shifting Swarm of Vocalities: An Assemblage Approach to PA Systems and Morning Assemblies in Finnish Primary Schools (1930s–1980s)
• Performing Waulking Songs as an Emotional Practice in Gaelic Scotland
• Voicing Imperial Order, Identity, and Resistance: The Singing of British Child Migrants
• The Speechless Patient: Charcot’s Diagnostic Interpretation of Vocal, Gestural, and Written Expressions in Hysterical Mutism
• Speak, Shout, Beseech – Making History in the Streets of the Eighteenth Century: Afterword
• Index