This article asks a deceptively simple question: what does democracy sound like? Democracy is commonly associated with various forms of voicing—political speeches, shouting protesters, filibusters in the halls Congress, or heated debates in teashops, salons, and newspapers around the world. Voice thus often functions as a metaphor for political participation and representation. Political metaphors of voice are usually disembodied, and are rarely invoked in reference to the other forms for political utterance, sound, or even noise that make up the many practices of participatory democracy. In such contexts, the notion of voice depends not on a single speaker but on a mass collectivity to make any message heard. The South Asian term āwāj refers explicitly to both the sonic and metaphorical meanings of voice, which this article uses to provincialize more commonly used global metaphors of voice. I consider what democracy sounds like by following the pathways of āwāj through two examples of participatory democracy on the streets of Kathmandu: a performance art piece and a political protest called Occupy Baluwatar. Āwāj and the sonic motifs I explore in these performances offer a conceptual rubric for breaking open the discourse of voice used in global human-rights organizations, humanitarian discourse, and liberal understandings of the public sphere, bringing forward a political subjectivity based on both intention and affect in a transmission of sound that is at once mass-mediated and acutely embodied.
In this article, I trace the relation between the figure of voice and subjectivity by examining a Nepali reform movement that sought to give daughters a birth right to ancestral property. At its heart was a contest over emerging class and gender subjectivities that were repeatedly defined through the figure of the voice and related practices of address, hailing, and recognition. The competing formations of voice I discuss here entail shifting notions of intimacy. To challenge property relations thus meant to change existing practices of speech, sentiment, and the meaning of voice itself. [voice, sentiment, property, subjectivity, Nepal, gender, class distinction]
Through the public broadcast of intimate telephone conversations between Nepalis abroad and those in Kathmandu, the diaspora is made “present” in Kathmandu. On these commercial FM programs, the voice is viewed as a key sign of emotional directness, authenticity, and intimacy. Simultaneously, the figure of the voice has been central in discussions about the promises (and failures) of democracy and transparent governance. These two seemingly distinct formations of voice are mutually constitutive. Sentimental discourse about the voice reiterates modern neoliberal discourse about democracy and vice versa. Both are crucial to the formation of an urban Nepali subject in this political moment, which is deeply shaped by the figure of the diaspora.
This article explores the ideas of directness and transparency that are fundamental to both the language ideology promoted by FM programs and the media ideology associated with FM radio. Speaking directly about one's desires is also critical to the process of learning to be a self‐conscious individual with a complex interior life. Ideas about the direct voice are shaped by the world of international development, the emergence of new media and publics, and the democracy movements in Nepal. Through a focus on a UNICEF‐sponsored youth program, I argue that direct speech and the direct voice critically shape radio listeners' subjectivity, creating the ideal neoliberal subject, at the level of the technology's material form and the content of its programs. [voice, radio, transparency, development, neoliberal subjectivity]
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