AustLit

Research of sound as culturally and socially productive in human life is becoming increasingly sophisticated with contributions from scholars in media and communication studies, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnomusicology. In The Voice and Its Doubles, anthropologist Daniel Fisher draws on work with Aboriginal radio stations in Brisbane (4AAA) and Darwin (TEABBA) to build several arguments around three key imperatives that he finds underwrite Indigenous audio media production: ‘giving voice, sounding black, and linking people up’. (4) One main argument Fisher presents is that the emergence of Aboriginal Australian media production since the 1980s has produced ‘a particular sedimentation in sound of a rich politics’ (2) in which voice, race and agency are simutaneously intimately entangled and fragmented by audio technologies, the institutions of the settler state and Indigenous activism. A related argument is that the ‘ideology of voice’ reproduced in Aboriginal media organisations ‘must be drawn through audio media’s power to both amplify and unsettle the voice and the character of its bearer’. (16) Fisher sets out to disentangle the expressive, technological and institutional dimensions of these arguments about Aboriginal voice, sound and expressivity via the concept of mediatisation. Using a range of literature familiar to scholars in culture and media theory (such as Bakhtin, Briggs, Derrida, Goffman, Althusser, Bourdieu), Fisher approaches voice as sound that is always already mediated, always to some extent removed from the speaking body, and always somehow staged in and through audio technology, politics, activism and sociality.' (Introduction)