Abstract
The moment a person starts speaking, especially to a stranger, his or her voice inevitably prompts a reaction. The other person consciously or subconsciously starts making assumptions – about his or her socio-economic background, ethnicity, geographic origin, and so on. In Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture, Amanda Nell Edgar builds a powerful argument about the social and cultural significance of the voice. She proposes a perspective called critical cultural vocalics, a theoretical and methodological orientation that resists the idea that voices are biologically sexed or naturally racialised and that instead embraces vocal sound as a socially shaped material text. This approach centralizes identity as articulated through a web of intersecting oppressions and privileges. (pp. 3–4)
Edgar argues that human voices both unite and divide people by ‘aurally communicating shared cultural space as well as uniqueness of individual bodies’ (p. 1). In her view, the voice ‘is central to cultural rhetoric’ (p. 2). The aim of her book is ‘to dissect the physical and culturally constructed interactions between a speaker’s voice and body and to extend that interaction through the media that makes culturally privileged vocal bodies available to listening ears’ (p. 6) by providing ‘a thorough discussion of the voice through a feminist, critical race, and cultural studies lens, offering a concrete method for considering the role of voice in music, speech, television, and film’ (p. 13). The book is split into Introduction, four substantive chapters and Conclusion. The substantive chapters analyse specific case studies. Chapter 1 is devoted to Adele and ‘the vocal intimacy of the blues’. Chapter 2 focuses on Morgan Freeman’s voice. Chapter 3 examines the impressions of politicians Sarah Palin and Barack Obama in Saturday Night Live. The final substantive chapter explores imitations of white speakers by non-white comedians. All in all, this is a thought-provoking book that would also be of interest to those communication scholars who do not necessarily focus on the voice in their own work.