The Performative Power of Vocality
(Routledge 2020 - Open Access)
American Theatre and Drama Society John W. Frick Book Award Honorable Mention
Addressed to qualitative researchers, artist-scholars, and activists committed to decolonization, cultural revitalization, and social justice, this monograph explores the non-verbal, non-semantic, non-discursive material and affective efficacy of vocality, with a particular focus on orally transmitted vocal traditions.
The Performative Power of Vocality offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to vocality beyond notions of “voice” as a metaphor for human agency, and beyond its association with human speech and language, making vocality problematically anthropocentric. In the academy, the privileging of writing over orality, which supports scriptocentrism as defined by performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood, contributes to turning the lived voice into a dematerialized and disembodied abstraction. Since experiential modes of cognition are devalued and delegitimized by scriptocentric knowledge systems, it becomes particularly challenging, if not impossible, to hear, sense, and feel the non-verbal, non-semantic, and non-discursive qualities of vocality.
Conquergood warns that “transcription is not a transparent or politically innocent model for conceptualizing and engaging the world,” and foregrounds the implication of textualism in “historical processes of political economic privilege and systematic exclusion,” suggesting that the visual and verbal dimensions of dominant regimes of knowledge “blind” us to the significance of embodied expressivity in human modes of communication (“Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research” 34-5). He provocatively points out that “scholarship is so skewed toward texts that even when researchers do attend to extralinguistic human action and embodied events they construe them as texts to be read,” an attitude that he considers to be a hallmark of Western imperialism (34). I infer that Western researchers have a responsibility to redress historical injustices linked to the processes of systematic exclusion identified by Conquergood, and contend that we must hold space for Indigenous philosophy, which values non-anthropocentric orally transmitted experiential ways of knowing, so that we may contribute to decentering, unsettling, and decolonizing Eurocentric paradigms that remain dominant in the academy.
In response to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, I seek to open a dialogical space inclusive and respectful of Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. Drawing from my research collaboration with the Indigenous Advisory Committee formed for this project, and building upon the work of Vine Deloria Jr., Gregory Cajete, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Shawn Wilson, Margaret Kovach, Manulani Aluli-Meyer, Jill Carter, Dylan Robinson, and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, among other Indigenous scholars, I consider vocality from the multiplicity of perspectives offered by Indigenous and Western philosophy, sound and voice studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology, sociology, phenomenology, cognitive science, physics, ecology, and biomedicine. I discuss my embodied research on vocality that entails (re-)learning the songs of my Occitan ancestors, and ask how experiencing resonance as relationality and reciprocity might strengthen relationship to our community and our natural environment, enhance health and well-being, reconnect us to our cultural heritage, and foster intercultural understanding and social justice.
Published in 2020 in the Routledge Voice Studies Series, this monograph is based on research funded by an Insight Grant ($94,090) and a Connection Grant ($24,745) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as by a UBC Hampton Grant ($3,000).
American Theatre and Drama Society John W. Frick Book Award Honorable Mention
The American Theatre and Drama Society’s John W. Frick Book Award honors the best monograph published each year on theatre and performance of/in the Americas, recognizing that notions of “America” and the United States encompass migrations of peoples and cultures that overlap and influence one another.
Award Committee: Henry Bial, University of Kansas (chair); Julie Burelle, UC-San Diego; Shane Vogel, Yale University.
The committee awards an Honorable Mention to Virginie Magnat’s The Performative Power of Vocality published by Routledge. In it, Magnat notes that the “non-verbal, non-semantic, non-discursive material and affective efficacy of vocality” is under-theorized in Performance Studies. Her book is a corrective gesture, providing a complex engagement with vocality “with a particular focus on orally transmitted vocal traditions” common among Indigenous nations and in communities facing various forms of hegemonic power.
We were impressed by the breadth of Magnat’s research which brings together elements of quantum physics, sound theory, anthropology, philosophy, the work of Grotowski as well as the research of Indigenous scholars in many fields to elucidate what happens in and through vocality and especially in the sharing of songs in language inherited from ancestors. Building on empirical research conducted in collaboration with Indigenous and settler participants who shared songs while being hosted by Indigenous collaborators on their territories, Magnat reflects on what the embodied practice of vocalizing activates in those who sing and those who witness them.
We were equally impressed by Magnat’s methodology which models what Anishinaabe scholar Jill Carter calls a “relational shift” toward the creation of truly respectful and dialogical conversations between Western and Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies. From the creation of an Indigenous Advisory Committee to ensure best practices to Magnat’s self-reflective engagement with her ancestors, be they familial in Occitania, a region of France with its own distinct culture and language, or academic (Magnat was trained in and is a scholar of the Grotowski tradition and French theory), [she] models decolonizing scholarship in important ways. - ATDS Citation
Review by Shannon Holmes for Voice and Speech Review, the official publication of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) :
“Part of the Routledge Voice Studies series, Virginie Magnat’s monograph The Performative Power of Vocality aims to investigate vocality, defined as the “sonorous substance of the lived voice” (xiii). This understanding of vocality moves beyond conventional and potentially limiting Western approaches to voice currently taught in theatre and performance studies programs in university and conservatories—many of which rely on logocentric perspectives. Placing voice as a subject of critical inquiry, Magnat uses cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches to vocality and, in doing so, offers alternatives to the leading mainstream pedagogies. [ . . . ] At a time when many voice practitioners are striving to decolonize their studios, classrooms, pedagogy, and practice, Magnat has provided us with a concrete example of how, through embodied inquiry, the dominant Eurocentric systems of the academy may be decentralized in voice training and performance studies. This volume proves that Western and Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies exist not only in conversation, but also potentially merge into new methodologies. Radical, innovative, and thought-provoking, The Performative Power of Vocality would be valuable to both researchers and artist-scholars committed to the decolonization of vocality, and it will serve as an important model for a new way forward in the field of voice studies.”
Review by Jaime Meier for Performance Research: “The Vindication of Vocality in Occitan and Indigenous Oral Traditions”:
Virginie Magnat’s The Performative Power of Vocality addresses the practices of vocality that are expressed through oral and song traditions that uphold communal strength and resistance. Through engaging with her Occitan heritage and partnering with Indigenous community members, [. . .] the author powerfully counters Eurocentric and colonial critical theory by situating and reclaiming her ancestors’ Occitan musical heritage alongside Indigenous oral traditions that have been nearly destroyed by state-sanctioned violence and assimilation. This book is a part of an emerging critical field built on oral and musical traditions that decentre mainstream and academic assertions that place European means of expression at the top of the embodied performance hierarchy. One such book is Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies (2020), which explores diversified creations of sound and performance in Indigenous cultures and the possibilities of intercultural collaboration in place of settler-colonial simplification of Indigenous performance within Turtle Island, commonly referred to as North America. Magnat and Robinson offer insight into familial experiences with performance and express solidarity and support for communities restoring verbal traditions. [. . .] Magnat’s compelling writing style and interdisciplinary experience brings performance studies, cultural anthropology and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies into conversation. This makes The Performative Power of Vocality a gratifying and indispensable read to an abundance of audiences outside of performance scholarship. The foundation laid by Magnat regarding the implementation of reciprocity when working with Indigenous community members and prioritizing previously discredited systems of knowledge will change the way the reader understands performance and approaches to decolonization.
