This article develops a linguistic media theory that brings together Peircean materialist indexicality from Barthes, Bazin, Doane, Krauss, and others with linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein’s nonreferential (social) indexicality. Following Argentine sound artist Eduardo Costa’s practice with tape recording, the article challenges critical theory to account for the sonic meaning at play in pragmatic (nonsemantic) communication related to gender, race, and diasporic community. More than a mere supplement or limit, material sonic media expand aesthetic representation, and media archaeology opens new possibilities to intervene in language politics.

A review of Michael Allan's "In the Shadow of World Literature."

This article examines the use of the personal voice recorder in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, its connections to noir film, and its use to manage narrative space between characters and audience.

“[LOS INDIOS SON] LOS VENCIDOS POR LA CONQUISTA ESPAÑOLA, LOS QUE SE EXPRESAN HOY EN LA VOZ DE RIGOBERTA-MENCHÚ” (“THE voice of Rigoberta Menchú allows the defeated to speak”; Burgos-Debray, Prólogo 8; Introduction xi). This statement introduces thetestimoniorecorded on cassette tapes and then edited into print by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray:Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la conciencia(My Name is Rigoberta Menchú and This Is How My Consciousness Was Born), published in English asI, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.In order to hear that voice from January 1982, and to consider the important role of aurality in the text's production and later uptakes, one now has to visit the Hoover Institution, on the campus of Stanford University. Given that Menchú'stestimonio, a genre defined by the work of personal witnessing on behalf of a collective struggling against injustice, tells the story of her community's socialist fight against exploitative labor practices and government-sponsored genocide, it might seem odd that her voice has been preserved in the archives of a right-wing think tank in the United States, some of whose fellows provided support for the government Menchú spoke against. However, the Hoover Institution has long dedicated itself to an archival counterrevolutionary practice, collecting the voices, newspapers, personal correspondence, and other documents associated with the ideological enemies of the institution's current and former fellows. Moreover, the location of Menchú's tapes makes some historical sense. Many today will recall that Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, and Menchú were at the center of what has since been called the Rigoberta Menchú controversy (Arias), in which the text galvanized culture war debates when progressive faculty members includedI, Rigoberta Menchúon syllabi to diversify the curriculum. Right-wing pundits railed against the inclusion as an example of “affirmative action for books” (Dinesh D'Souza qtd. in Strauss) and denounced Menchú'stestimonioafter the Stanford PhD and anthropologist David Stoll revealed that it included several inaccurate statements.

This article investigates the different affordances of magnetic tape and print as they are entextualized in various co(n)texts by writers, ethnographers, and musicians throughout the Americas in the late 1960s. I analyze printed books made from tape recordings—Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet and his interview subject Esteban Montejo’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Rodolfo Walsh’s true-crime denunciation ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who killed Rosendo?, 1968), and Andy Warhol’s experimental a: a novel (1968)—to ask why these writers transduced their recordings into print rather than release them as audiobooks, how or if listening to those tapes would alter the meaning of their printed entextualizations, and what musical interactions with the same media in the same contexts can tell us about the limits both of print and of symbolic musical notation. Tracing the intersection of musical and literary works, the article argues that a writerly ethics of distortion, rather than fidelity, arises from this mutual encounter with sound on tape, and ponders how dialogic audiobooks might contest older issues of power and representation for those writers, North and South, who worked in support of marginalized (Afro-Cuban, working class, and queer) subjects.

Bringing together Frankfurt School poetics and the history of Argentina and Borges's ongoing alterations to his poetic archive, this essay studies his minor poem "El truco" to understand how Borges's poetics strive to reimagine Argentine politics and the project of writing history.