The Performative Force of Accented Speech: Language, Body, and Violence

Tingting Hui | Leiden University | supervisors: Ernst van Alphen en Yasco Horsman

In the contemporary globalized world, the accent marks a distinction between insiders and outsiders, and can sometimes lead to hostility and bodily attack. Such violence typically performs a gesture of othering based on the conflation of ethnicity and language, and further raises the question of how to undo the violence with a speech that remains accented and is therefore, always already in the locus of that violence. Through an analysis of theoretical, nphilosophical, and literary texts that dramatize or reflect on the implications of speaking with an accent, this project aims to 1) investigate the socio-political and cultural dynamics that take place when accented speech resounds publicly and 2) map the different modes of speaking that are available to accented speakers. By highlighting the bodily dimension of accented speech, this project intervenes in debates on language and racialization in postcolonial studies, and seeks to contribute to a critique of the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism that naturalizes reified conceptions of ‘native speakers’ and ‘mother tongue.’