Associate Professor of Literature Pavitra Sundar was one of 45 authors invited to contribute a “keyword” to a special issue of the cinema studies journal Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies.
As the journal editors note, this special double issue “is dedicated to exploring key ideas, categories and debates raised in South Asian screen studies, and their significance for the wider field.”
Given her expertise in sound studies, cinema studies, and gender studies — and her previous publications on singing voices, in particular — Sundar was invited to write the entry on “voice.”
“Voice,” she wrote, “is not only a means of civic and social participation, it is what makes the speaker a member of a community. Spanning the private and the public, the individual and the collective, voice figures as the locus of personhood and social or political worth.”
