A conversation between Slava Greenberg, Michelle Pfeifer, Vijay Ramjattan, Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar

In 2021, as our co-edited book Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice entered production, a Silicon Valley start-up began advertising an app that uses AI to modify accents in real time. As one reporter put it, “rather than learning to pronounce words differently, technology could do that for you. There’d no longer be a need for costly or time-consuming accent reduction training. And understanding would be nearly instantaneous.” Thinking with an Accent offers a sorely-needed alternative to this vision of a world where communication and understanding happen automatically, and seemingly magically, without translation or friction. Taking as our point of departure the idea that an accent is not an unfortunate thing that only some people putatively have, but rather a powerful and world-forming mode of perception, a form of minoritarian expertise, and a complex formation of desire, our 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.

Thinking with an Accent was published in print and Open Access in February 2023. This summer, a few of us co-editors and contributors gathered online for a conversation about our respective contributions to the book and our thinking on and after its publication. Highlights from our virtual roundtable appear below.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (co-editor): It’s been six months since the publication of Thinking with an Accent (TWA). In the intervening time, I’ve been tremendously excited by how many of us are already extending and expanding our interventions in the accent volume: in new articles, in video essays, and even in just-published or forthcoming monographs. I know that my own recently completed book manuscript, on the pedagogy and accented reading of Indian English literature in the Anglo-American university, could not have been written as it is without TWA.

Pavitra, you’ve just written a book (congratulations!) in which you theorize the practice of “listening with a feminist ear.” Relatedly, your chapter for TWA theorizes “listening with an accent” as a “queer kind of listening.” In a recent video essay, you perform “listening to listening.” How do these four forms or modalities of listening relate to each other?

Pavitra Sundar (co-editor): Thanks for this question, Ragini! As you know, I was working on my book and our accent volume around the same time, which meant that I was circling around similar issues in the two projects. Both “listening with a feminist ear” and “listening with an accent” are animated by a kind of critical utopianism. Enfolded within them is a critique of current sonic regimes – of what Jennifer Stoever, for example, calls the racialized “listening ear” – as well as a challenge to those regimes. My concepts turn on the belief that we can re-tune the listening ear. In my book, Listening with a Feminist Ear, I bring a sonic sensibility to the analysis of Bombay cinema, examining how specific voices, languages, genres, and sounds come to be understood as they are. So the questions at the heart of my monograph are similar to the ones we ask in Thinking with an Accent: how do we hear accent/cinema? Can we hear it differently?

In my essay for TWA, I play with a wonderful poem by Aracelis Girmay to re-theorize accent in relation to place. Accent is often thought to be tied in place by place. The aural trace of the place in which we were born or raised is taken as a sign of our national, ethnic, and/or racial identity. I take that potentially essentializing notion and apply it to myself (the listener or reader) instead of the accented speaker. Rather than listening for the place audible in others’ tongues, I ask how my own listening is placed. From where do I listen? In your feedback on my draft, you noted the proximity of my framework to standpoint epistemology. You’re absolutely right! But where standpoint epistemology tends to mobilize visual metaphors (regarding how one sees the world) I emphasize the aural. How does my social location, including and especially my experiences with language, shape the ways in which I listen? To what extent is that place from which I listen fixed? How might I re-orient – or, better yet, disorient – the standpoint I habitually occupy as a listener?

In these projects and in my recent video-essay work, I’ve been inspired by Nina Sun Eidsheim (another of our TWA contributors!), who, in her brilliant book The Race of Sound, calls on us to “listen to listening.” To shift attention away from the sonic object (voice, in particular) and to the naturalized ways in which we make sense of voice through listening. Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about your work on voice, Slava. One of the things I love about your TWA chapter, “Accenting the Trans Voice, Echoing Audio-Dysphoria,” is that it forces us to think about voice and accent in relation to each other. Could you say a bit about how your thinking on either or both of those categories developed over the course of writing the essay?

Slava Greenberg: Thank you, Pavitra, for the opportunity to share my writing process, some of which was inspired by conversations with you, Rigini, Pooja, and Akshya, and which have also influenced my work on the unauthorized biography of gender dysphoria. When I first sat in front of a blank document to write my chapter, a childhood memory from preschool in Kyiv typed itself. It was about hearing a disembodied voice that sounded like my mom, speaking Ukrainian, which drew me out of the classroom and onto the school grounds, where I found a child on a tree on the other side of the school fence being scolded by my teacher in Russian while surrounded by my classmates. I told the kid to wait for me because my mom would be able to understand. The next thing I remember is the three of us eating sweet strawberries in our kitchen. What was actually at the core of that memory was my dad’s condescending jokes about my mom’s Ukrainian accent. It wasn’t that she gladly spoke Ukrainian – with whoever was willing (or not), particularly her two siblings, at any and all occasions – but her accent that became the punchline of his jokes. My mom laughed along, paying it no attention and carrying on with pride.

I deleted the story, realizing that I had conflated voice and accent because they were both the butt of my dad’s jokes, and the kid was just speaking Ukrainian in a Russian-speaking-dominant city, not Russian with a Ukrainian accent as I initially remembered. I also deleted the bit about my dad’s favorite joke merging the two by provoking my mom to respond with a word that sounded like a bark to a Russian-speaking ear (how). As an accented speaker, I am experienced with training for vocal assimilation. As a trans man, I am experienced with the transition of my voice on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) into a deeper, yet somewhat grinding-sounding and, as I elaborate in the chapter, feminine-sounding voice over the phone. The accenting of my voice and speech are intertwined.

Activating and then deleting this childhood memory was how I knew that the only representation of this entangled voice-accent phenomenon that resonated with me was in a film centering an accented trans woman who does not utter a word but sings one karaoke song, echoing someone else’s words and muffling her accent and trans voice at the same time. Hiding an accented trans voice for safety has brought back to me the memory of the child up on a tree, proudly yelling back in their own voice and language, and the taste of those strawberries my mom sprinkled sugar all over, which we shared.

Michelle, I would like to extend the same opportunity to you now, to share a shift in your thought process as you were writing your chapter, “‘The Native Ear’: Accented Testimonial Desire and Asylum.” Is there a deletion, omission, perhaps a scene or moment of forgetfulness that you’re now rethinking? I’d love to know more about the motivations behind your thinking through the synthetic voices and the possibilities of migrant testimony.

Michelle Pfeifer: Thank you so much for your question, Slava. I started working on linguistic analysis and migrant testimony in 2015 when Germany took center stage in the so-called European refugee crisis. While Germany was hailed as a benevolent, liberal, and humanitarian center of Europe – supposedly “welcoming” refugees with open arms – what we were actually observing on the ground was an intensification of border and asylum regimes. One way in which this intensification took place was through different technological, biometric, and data-driven tools that were used to determine the identities and countries of origin of people seeking asylum in Germany. One of those tools is a dialect recognition software that supposedly can distinguish between different, mostly Arabic, dialects on the basis of a speech sample with an average length of 25 seconds. This software was used to contradict the statements people made in their asylum interviews and ended up further restricting the right to asylum in Germany because people’s claims to asylum could be and still are regarded with suspicion.

As I started to research this dialect recognition software, it became apparent that its use, development, and functioning were shrouded in intentional secrecy and obfuscation. So, the motivation for my research was twofold. First, I wanted to find, collect, and publish information on linguistic analysis and asylum in order to expose and challenge how it reproduces and intensifies the precarity of people seeking asylum. Second, I wanted to dig deeper into the underlying assumptions and claims of linguistic expertise of voice recognition and asylum to show and critique how applicants are placed in a double bind: they are incited to speak during asylum procedures, and then simultaneously have their testimony scrutinized and placed under general suspicion. My contribution to TWA shows one of the directions of this research. I focus on predecessors of dialect recognition software and the convergences of linguistic expertise and law, as well as the longer colonial continuities that produce what I call a linguistic passport that, like other passports, distributes both possibilities and impossibilities of movement and mobility.

Since writing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about linguistic mobilities more broadly, including within the classroom setting. Vijay, your chapter, “Accent Reduction as Raciolinguistic Pedagogy,” ends with a discussion of possible strategies for a counterpedagogy to accent reduction programs. This discussion was very generative for my thinking on my own pedagogical practice and experience navigating educational institutions. Would you like to share an example (or examples) of these counterpedagogical strategies from your teaching, research, and/or writing practice?

Vijay A. Ramjattan: Thanks, Michelle! As someone who teaches listening and speaking to international students, who may experience anxiety about their accents and thus seek out accent reduction, my counterpedagogy attempts to alleviate this anxiety by challenging the alleged effectiveness of accent reduction. While this service is marketed as a means to become intelligible, its conceptualization of intelligibility is problematic, to say the least. Instead of being a quality of an individual, intelligibility should be understood as a goal requiring the collaboration of speaker and listener (in the case of oral communication). The problem with accent reduction, then, is that it requires the speaker to undertake the entire burden of communication without ever considering how the listener needs to put in some effort as well. This is particularly concerning when listening practices can be informed by ideologies of oppression and thus unfairly position certain speakers as orally deficient no matter how they sound.

In my chapter, I imagine a counterpedagogy in terms of and at the scale of institutional change. However, as an educator, I realize that counterpedagogies first form at the micro level. To counteract the idea of intelligibility as an individual trait and place more importance on listening, I try to have students develop listening strategies, which can range from paying closer attention to the context of an utterance to decipher unclear words, to recognizing how other semiotic practices such as gesture help to communicate a message. Wherever possible, I also have classroom discussions that explore how accent helps to reproduce racism, xenophobia, and other interlocking systems of oppression in educational contexts and beyond. Inspired by these discussions, students have given presentations on accent discrimination.

To return to the matter of scale, I continue to imagine how what I do in the classroom could be translated into a collective effort to undo the pernicious effects of accent reduction. Ragini, I wonder if you might similarly describe your chapter “Is There a Call Center Literature?” as a micro-instance of a larger possible intervention. In your chapter, you use the idea of call center literature to pursue the accentedness of reading. For example, your discussion of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning  highlights your own accented perception that Majumdar is writing for a non-Indian Anglophone reader. For readers who may be uninterested in “call center literature” as such, what are some key takeaways from your chapter that you would like to emphasize?

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan: A terrific question, Vijay. You’re very right that I hope my essay on call center literature might offer an intervention at multiple scales. On the one hand, it is an inside baseball response to academic debates on World Literature. On the other hand, I intend it to be a more generally applicable performance of thinking and argument-formation that takes seriously the ways that all of us variously pronounce our desired interventions into any critical conversation. Call center literature is an archive, a method, and an object of desire. It is also, I argue, a literature of accommodation that draws our attention to what we might call, following Jennifer Stoever, the “reading ear” and how it is primed to perceive the non-Western Anglophone text. To repeat Pavitra’s questions about listening with a difference: from where and how do we read, and how do our own accented readings in fact produce the texts we read?

I mentioned earlier that I recently completed a book manuscript on the pedagogy of Indian English literature. In that work, I try to further develop a method of accented reading that combines close textual exegesis of literary texts with discursive analysis of critical debates and responses to the texts. The result is a metacritical mode of engagement with literature that strives to attend to the cross-pollinating and co-creative dynamics of reading and writing. When we read any work of literature, we have to ask not just what the author is saying, but rather what they are saying to whom in what disciplinary and curricular contexts – or, for that matter, what the text is being made to say by a critic or pedagogue in order to advance some particular argument. In this way, I seek to build on TWA’s signal revisioning of the relationship between listening and speaking through an elaboration of accent as a non-indexical mode of perception, and not simply as an identitarian marker.

It’s been such a joy to do this work alongside all of you! Looking forward to our next opportunity to think together with and about accent.