Honorable Mention of the 2023 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian StudiesLonglist Finalist of the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book AwardListening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries.Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.
Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College.
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionListening With a Feminist EarListening as Habit and HermeneuticSoundworkInter-AuralityPolitics of NationSinging, Listening, SpeakingChapter One: SingingFrom Singing to Musicking: Women’s Voices, Bodies, and the Audiovisual ContractConjoining Sound and ImagePlayback Singing and the “Old” Audiovisual ContractSinging on TelevisionThe “Ethnic” Voice and the Aural LagMillennial SoundworkWomen’s Musicking and the Somatic ClauseChapter Two: ListeningRe-Sounding the Islamicate: The Cinematic Qawwali and its Listening PublicsQawwalis’ Classic Features5Ishq Ishq! Romance in Classic QawwalisWorld Music and Post-LiberalizationDe-Islamicization and Irrelationality In SufipopPious Listening in Dargah QawwalisSpectacular Dancing in Item Number-Esque QawwalisChapter Three: SpeakingSpeaking of the Xenophone: Language as Sound in SatyaFrom Cinematic Language to Dialogue-baaziLanguage, Politics, and CinemaHindi Film LanguagesAccenting BambaiyyaLanguage, Violence, and MarginalityDhichkiaoon! And Other Cinematic SoundsCodaListening, Loving, LongingTextual and Aural PleasuresTranslation and TemporalitySeditious Touching in SoundworkBibliographyIndex
Honorable Mention of the 2023 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies