CFP: AAA panel "Polyphony in Politics"

[Elise Kramer]

Hello all,

I am hoping to put together a panel for the 2012 AAAs entitled "Polyphony in Politics," and I'm looking for a few more presenters. The preliminary abstract is below; if you're interested in participating, please send an abstract of the paper you'd like to present to elise at uchicago.edu by Friday, March 9th (but the sooner the better!).

Thanks,
Elise Kramer

PhD Candidate
University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology
elise at uchicago.edu


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Polyphony in Politics

Mikhail Bakhtin famously argued that the novel as a literary form is characterized by a multiplicity of voices, each with its own vantage point and imagined social locus. This panel invites presenters to consider the ways in which political discourse, too, is shot through with this polyphony. The category of “political discourse” here is interpreted broadly, encompassing everything from formal oratory to protests to the everyday language of “identity politics” — and panelists are encouraged to explore the bounds of politics in their presentations — but one of the qualities that unifies all of these diverse communicative situations is the speaker’s acute awareness of the uptake of her speech. Political language is meant to be heard, even if only in certain contexts by certain people, and this panel considers the ways in which political language’s form is shaped by the inseparability of its production from its reception.

In particular, the panel encourages presenters to ask whether and in what ways the heightened level of explicit scrutiny that political speech faces makes words’ non-neutrality more salient, highlighting their connections to other discursive moments and rendering them rhetorically valuable and/or freighted. How do political actors, engaging in complex and multi-layered calculi about their utterances both as interactions and as unmoored circulating texts, marshall the heteroglossic landscape to create densely polyphonic discourse? How do actors draw on conventionalized “voices” associated with stereotyped social categories, both strategically (for rhetorical purposes) and unthinkingly (constrained by notions of “appropriateness” and intelligibility)? How do political actors voice _themselves_, self-reflexively embodying different personae at different moments? How do political voices vary within one group, between groups, within one speech event, across speech events? How do actors use voicing to align themselves with some and distance themselves from others? And what are the effects of this polyphony: how is it taken up, responded to? How does its legibility presuppose and entail specific sets of cultural beliefs?

By casting an anthropological eye on the variegated texture of political discourse, the panel will emphasize language’s centrality in the political process, not just as a denotational vehicle for conveying ideas but as an indexical tool for effecting social change.