Session Abstract
Pythagoras famously lectured his disciples, the 'akousmatikoi', from behind a screen, the better to train their focus on his voice, which gave rise to the concept of "acousmatic voice," a voice that one hears without seeing the cause behind it. What if that screen were a technology such as the phonograph or the radio? And what if that voice turned out to be your own? My lecture will explore Baldwin's relation to mid-20th century media (radio, phonograph, television, cinema) and how those relations made strange the very thing he was trying to capture in his writing; his voice. I will invite us to imagine how, in his response to this disruption, this slipping away, Baldwin serves as a model for a kind of freedom -- a freedom to begin to become oneself.
Speaker Bio
Stephen Best is a professor in the Department of English and director of Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities. A scholar of American and African American literature and culture, his books include The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018). Of late, he has been thinking a lot about memes and what is afforded by taking them seriously as objects of scholarly inquiry.