"Documentary Audibilities: Voice, Listening, and the Human"

"Documentary Audibilities: Voice, Listening, and the Human"

Pooja Rangan photo
  • Events
  • Speaker
March 282017
4:00pm
SSMS 2135
Pooja Rangan
Michael Curtin, co-sponsor

Mellichamp Global Dynamics Initiative
and
Film and Media Studies Colloquium
present

Pooja Rangan
Assistant Professor
English/Film and Media Studies
Amherst College

"Documentary Audibilities: Voice, Listening, and the Human"

Wednesday, October 18, 3 - 4:30pm
SSMS 2135

In the field of documentary, voice, rather than point of view, is the prevailing metaphor for a filmmaker’s unique perspective, signaling the documentary genre’s emphasis on spoken words, as well as its enduring social mission of “giving voice.” My talk will unpack the humanitarian resonances of this metaphor, as elaborated in my book Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP 2017), in conversation with recent scholarship on race, sound, and listening. I will discuss how documentary’s vocal conventions can normalize as well as undermine the complex hierarchies of race, gender, and other axes of difference implicated in the practices of giving voice and bearing witness.

Pooja Rangan is Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College.She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP 2017), and coeditor of a forthcoming special issue of the journalDiscourse on “Documentary Audibilities.”