Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu

Abstract

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.

MEDIATING KINSHIP: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia

“…In approaching this here, I have been helped by the attention of ethnographers to the ways media entail particular kinds of audience. For instance, Mazzarella (2004) and Kunreuther (2006) draw on Althusserian understandings of interpellation to foreground the particular manner by which broadcast media may produce those audiences, publics, or listeners to which they seem merely to refer 18 . Importantly, their work attends both to the affective and reflexive vehicles of public making, and to the metapragmatic labor involved in the production of immediacy in mediatized public cultures (see also Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Hirshkind 2006).…”

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

“…These practices are harnessed in turn to an ideological revalorization of the voice contrasting the new prestige form with others that are metonyms for the national past. Kunreuther (2006Kunreuther ( , 2010 shows how urban Nepali subjectivity is constituted through the mutual constitution of two constructions of voice that unite in radio-listening practices (on related issues raised in the context of indigenous Australian radio, see Fisher 2009). Kunreuther discusses the ways national and international institutions promote voice as the central sign of modern, democratic, neoliberal subjectivity, whereas local ideologies about vocal "directness" position the voice as the locus of emotional authenticity; both are made manifest through radio broadcasts of intimate telephone conversations among members of the Nepali diaspora.…”

Daily Wires and Daily Blossoms: Cultivating Regimes of Circulation in Tamil India's Newspaper Revolution

“…The interrelated problems of material form, infrastructurally conditioned practices of reception, and the mediating function of genres have all come to the fore with particular sharpness in critical analyses of modernist ideologies of transparency (Bauman & Briggs 2003; Hall 1980; Kunreuther 2006; Mazzarella 2006). Of particular relevance to my discussion here is Miyako Inoue's (2006) analysis of the role of Japan's “write as you speak” ( gembun'itchi ) movement in producing newly objectified forms of “women's language.” Much like one of the newspapers I discuss in this essay, it was a modernist desire to make writing closer to speech, in the name of a certain transparency and fidelity to the sound of language, that appears to have led to the marked representation of particular varieties of “spoken language” in written form, such that they could be displayed, cited, and enjoyed “vicariously” by readers.…”

“…The interrelated problems of material form, infrastructurally conditioned practices of reception, and the mediating function of genres have all come to the fore with particular sharpness in critical analyses of modernist ideologies of transparency (Bauman & Briggs 2003;Hall 1980;Kunreuther 2006;Mazzarella 2006). Of particular relevance to my discussion here is Miyako Inoue's (2006) analysis of the role of Japan's "write as you speak" (gembun'itchi) movement in producing newly objectified forms of "women's language."…”