Brought to Life by the Voice : Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India / Amanda Weidman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weidman, Amanda J., 1970- author.

Series:

South Asia Across the Disciplines

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

University of California Press 2021

[s.l.] : University of California Press, 2021.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers' voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman's historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Spelling

Introduction: Theorizing Playback

Part I. Prehistories

1. Trading Voices: The Gendered Beginnings of Playback

Part II. Playback's Dispensation

2. "A Leader for All Song": Making a Dravidian Voice

3. Ambiguities of Animation: On Being "Just the Voice"

4. The Sacred and the Profane: Economies of the (Il)licit

Part III. Afterlives

5. The Raw and the Husky: On Timbral Qualia and Ethnolinguistic Belonging

6. Anxieties of Embodiment: Liveness and Deadness in the New Dispensation

7. Antiplayback

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520976399

0520976398

OCLC:

1204266599

Publisher Number:

https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.104

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access