Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice. By PoojaRangan, AkshyaSaxena, Ragini TharoorSrinivasan, and PavitraSundar (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press. 2023. xvii +301 pp.

Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice is an edited volume consisting of fifteen chapters and an introduction. In the volume's introduction, Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar explain that a “colloquial” conceptualization of accent is “a phonological index of one's identity” (p. 3). The authors of the introduction push back against this notion, arguing that it often focuses on the person's placement in some predetermined category in terms of race, gender, class, and/or nation. The volume sets out, rather, to shift the focus of thinking about accent to the encounter implied by listening. The idea of accent does not just involve a speaker, however, represented, but also a hearer, someone whose perception is key in the constitution of the phenomenon. And also important to the volume's purpose is putting power at the forefront of thinking about accent. The introduction's authors explain that “Accent… is the capacity of listeners to imagine vocalic bodies that exceed the control and the calculations of the speaker” (p. 3). However, the authors of the introduction note that knowledge informed by accent is subject to disruption. Following the authors' definition of accent is the claim, “Equally, accent is the capacity to upend what beholders and listeners (think they) see, hear, or know” (p. 3). The volume means to cast an especially wide net in its purview and the introduction makes a point of mentioning that the volume includes concepts drawing from the humanities and social sciences. The studies to follow include in their considerations “institutional contexts, media infrastructures, and material practices of accented thought, in the most capacious sense of the term [emphasis in original]” (p. 13). Chapters span “different media forms, cultural industries, interpretive practices, disciplinary frameworks, and scales of analysis” (p. 13). Some of the chapters provide guidance on how accents ought to be envisioned and approached analytically or lay out recommendations on how institutions ought to provide additional or alternative training for personnel—both in pursuit of quashing the inequality accent aids in reproducing. Yet other chapters coin new meanings for accent, rendering it an analytical term fit for the case study at hand. The volume is divided into three sections in order to give shape to the broad and multiple concerns raised by the notion of accent and the coinage of new meanings for the term. The first section is meant to take the understanding of accent as a stigma and, rather, stress that accent can reveal both stigma and expertise. Meant to counter points of view from which accent bears negativity, the five chapters in the first section explore deficiencies in prejudicial regimes of judgment and suggest alternatives by which accent can be seen as “an inflection of minoritarian expertise” (p. 13). The second section refocuses the attention on who bears an accent from the utterance to perception. The five chapters in this section consider practices and institutional contexts through which accent is made socially meaningful and consequential. The chapters stress mechanisms by which accents come to bear meanings and institutional consequences that serve entities other than the particular people whose behavior is seen as accented. The third and final section of the book is meant to introduce affect, especially desire, to the already well-established theme of identity in scholarship on accent. The five chapters in the third section ask what is made possible in terms of enhanced intimacy, euphoria, and pleasure by thinking about the idea of accent in practices like reading and singing—in film, audio recording, and other media. The subject matter of the chapters is eclectic. The first chapter of the first section, for example, explores “Homecoming,” a Chinese Tang Dynasty poem as well as the play, Pygmalion, in an effort to understand the decline of the authority of reason in “our twenty-first-century, post-truth society” (p. 33). Setting the tone for the volume, the final paragraph of the chapter advocates “asking how accents are historically heard, objectified, evaluated, used, and reproduced for various purposes” (p. 33). It also advocates “installing accents in a new dynamic of epistemic and medial categorization, whereby accents can be differentiated in accordance with the types of knowledge and values they generate and regenerate” (p. 33). The second chapter in the section considers accent reduction pedagogies in Canada and the United States and identifies the kinds of valorized stereotypes they rely on, often reproducing white supremacism and the kinds of stereotypes they produce that get projected onto clients. The chapter explains, “What is needed… is for employers to engage in a critical imaginative listening in which they consider how different types of accented voices can be either privileged or disadvantaged in their conceptions of how work is defined, who should be able to do it, and so forth” (p. 49). The third chapter in the section uses the notion of “curb cut” (in its radical form, describing disabled men with nondisabled allies in Berkeley modifying sidewalks to make themselves more mobile) to engage with some of the notions of Rosina Lippi-Green's influential English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States to stress that “Accents that interrupt, delay, or complicate smooth communication are not handicaps to be overcome, nor are they inconveniences to be accommodated” (p. 66). While this review cannot give even a brief sketch of the purposes of the rest of the chapters, it is important to note generally what readers will find in the volume. Other chapters in the first section include explorations of uses of Spanish, Spanglish, and Spanish Accented English in short message service texting (chapter 4) and the use of accents to constitute place and who belongs in literature (chapter 5). Chapters in the second section include a consideration of literature produced about call centers to ask questions about for whom such literature is written (chapter 6); an exploration of vocal recognition software and insights about what voices are recognized successfully and what (often-racialized) voices are rendered problematic (chapter 7); an account of Deaf Scholars of Color and the difficulties an academic register presents as White Female interpreters are institutionally overrepresented in interpreter labor (chapter 8); the coinage of new meanings for accent to aid in the analysis of the use of represented speech in news reporting on court decisions contributing to the public personae of politicians in Brazil (chapter 9); and meditations on asylum claims through which the author shows that the listening ear is valorized over the testimony provided (chapter 10). Chapters in the third section include a rumination on Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy for the contribution of orthographic renderings in roman script to the characters' existence in a multilingual world (chapter 11); a consideration of a film entitled Third Body in order to think about the agency of the transgendered voice in moments of “audio-dysphoria” and “audio-euphoria” (chapter 12); an experimental rendering—the voice of activism in the left-hand column and the voice of the philosopher in the right-hand column—of recounting the deaths of two Black men, Adama Traoré and George Floyd (chapter 13); a critique of the 2014 film Do I Sound Gay? that asks what aspects of capitalist production the filmmaker did not address (chapter 14); and an analysis of a poem, “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card” by Aracelis Girmay in order to develop ideas about listening without othering. Readers familiar with work on voice, style, and addressivity, among other concepts in linguistic anthropology, will find much to ponder as they make their way through the case studies, analyses, and critiques of the volume. Those chapters that have an ethnographic sensibility, often grounded in an autobiographical point of view, might especially appeal to linguistic anthropologists (as they did to me). More broadly, Thinking with an Accent brings together authors using a wide range of methods and theoretical notions, some with experimental aims, to consider the significance of what accent might mean, why it might matter, and to whom—in institutions, technological developments, and media productions. One finishes the volume having learned how some have conceptualized accent, in academic, social, and artistic milieus, and what disadvantage, limitation, or damage has resulted. One has also learned some possibilities that might arise from shifts in accent's conceptualization.

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