In this panel, we mine the space between laboring at a distance (the tele-commute) and communicating at a distance (tele-communication), while attending to technological and aesthetic mediations of the contemporary (the telematic). From within this tangle, other keywords emerge: proximity, temporality, voice. What are the aesthetics of telecommuting? How do literary writers, performers, and sound artists take up the material conditions of the telecommute? How do literary, filmic, and sonic texts register the dematerialization of labor? How might the regimes of the telephonic and telematic transform our conceptions of the global subject?
This panel investigates work that rethinks the grounds of telecommuted contact, engages with systematic flows of text and language, and reimagines the embodied and material processes by which voice indexes communal experience. Whether representing telecommunication as actual work or reflecting the conditions that undergird communication networks, the figures we will discuss enable us to map the seemingly unknowable excess of information-labor and to produce important critiques and potentialities within the dream of infinite and instant connection.
This panel includes a range of ranks (associate and assistant professors) and fields (studies in sound, global Anglophone literatures, Indian English literature, poetics, and diaspora, to name a few). Each presentation will take twenty minutes, leaving ample time for the Chair's response and audience discussion.
John Melillo, “Telepathies of Sound”
This paper discusses the audible aesthetics of telecommunication infrastructures. It argues that contemporary poetries of and in sound work through the fragile logistics of signal. Interpreting the work of four artists—Susan Howe’s poetics of phonographic telepathies, Jennifer Scappettone’s explorations of the environmental and human costs of digital life, Caroline Bergvall’s collaborative projects on philology and accent, and the sound poetry of Charmaine Lee—Melillo describes a concrete poetics of telecommuted orality. Here, voice emerges from signal decay within the circulation and recirculation of information. These artists transform the interminable phatic wondering of zoom (“You hear me?”) into powerful aesthetic meditations on connection and communion.
Julie Beth Napolin, “Radical Listening in Voice-to-Text Media Environments”
To recite and repeat: it carries across cultures and mediums, linking the ancient ars memoria to colonial education and to machine listening. This talk discusses the implications of what poet and media artist James Allister Sprang calls “radical listening” in the context of voice-to-text technology and other practices of recitation in which voices move from inscription to performance and back. In Turning Towards Radical Listening (2019), Sprang developed a sculptural sound-based installation and echo chamber in which recorded recitations of poems and conversations moved through Google’s voice-to-text software (hacked by Sprang). Sprang sought to sonically reimagine the possibilities of machine listening to Black voices–all the more important in our post-Zoom world of auto-transcription. Connecting Sprang’s mediations to the Wooster Group’s verbatim recitations of prison work songs and to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s postcolonial novel Dictee, this paper reflects on the politics of recitation, both in its old and new media configurations. How can recitation subsume linguistic control to activate new spaces for listening and intervention?
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, “Echolocation and the Where(abouts) of the Post-Anglophone”
In 2012, Indian Anglophone writer Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began writing in Italian. She sought to refresh her craft by pursuing what exists “outside” of and at a “distance” from her. This paper situates Lahiri’s turn to writing “anglophone literature in Italian” in terms of broader questions concerning the interface between location and locution in postcolonial literature. Literatures are read as “postcolonial” (or ethnic or diasporic) on the basis of certain assumptions about proximity, distance, and voice—assumptions about how close the subject is to the author’s experience; assumptions about how far an author has traveled in their use of a language; assumptions about the accented voice’s relation to the global. Engaging recent scholarship on accent, postcolonial languaging, and the acoustics of the racialized text, this paper asks: What might Lahiri’s post-Anglophone turn – in particular her 2021 novel Whereabouts – teach us about the relationship between reading and writing at a distance: from the self, language, residence, home, or nation?