This tenth SDUK broadsheet takes up PRONOUNCING: how speech, performance, language, and poetry shape sociopolitical discourse. In parallel with Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, a series of leadership portraits and audio addresses from artists-as-leaders, the Blackwood engages discourses of speech and power throughout 2021.
Constance Hockaday’s introduction to Artists-in-Presidents outlines the project’s central conceit: What forms of leadership do we need now? In a roundtable discussion in this issue, panelists reflect on their changing roles as public figures in and adjacent to healthcare amid the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, under-resourced mental health and addiction services, and intergenerational legacies of medical trauma. In a reflection on Black feminist organizing in the GTHA, Maandeeq Mohamed likewise examines how activists express collective power. These polyvocal expressions of leadership are richly illustrated by Ines Doujak, whose work envisions human-animal hybridity.
This issue’s theme might have readers wondering: How are free speech principles reflected in institutions and social movements? Shama Rangwala reflects on how freedom is conceived and expressed across social spheres, with attention to the unfreedoms from which these values emerge. Rinaldo Walcott similarly questions whose speech is valued, and whose is erased in a column on the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ censure of the University of Toronto. Jacob Wren enacts solidarity with the CAUT censure through an act of withdrawal.
If speech is never separate from the conditions through which it’s disseminated, how does language shift in response to social and technological change? Ai Taniguchi discusses linguistics amid the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing how anti-Asian racism is perpetuated through explicit and implicit phrasing. Matt Nish-Lapidus explores technologically-driven linguistic change by scrutinizing the promises and faults of artificial intelligence.
As when AI’s mistakes stretch language to its breaking point, poetic contributions to this issue probe the limits, double-meanings, slippages, and failures of expression. In a series of short poems, texts, and images, Oana Avasilichioaei ponders the intermediaries of our understanding: voice, ear, and written script. In a poem excerpt from a collection exploring the physiology of speech, Jordan Scott expresses the precarity of language through contemplation of speech impediments.
In looking at languages through their structures and systems, one might wonder: How is the immediacy of speech mediated and translated? Louise Hickman’s article on stenography foregrounds the invisibilized and gendered labour that underpins access technologies. An artist project by Jesse Chun explores linguistic mutability and untranslatability, while questioning the dominance of English as a language globalized through colonialism.
At a time of widespread language revitalization, what strategies are being used for language reclamation? Vanessa Dion Fletcher’s performance documents her efforts to learn and translate Lenape, while critiquing the colonial, patriarchal, and ableist perspectives from which its English translations originate.
This issue concludes with a glossary; attention to speech and language continues in this section, where poetic interventions by Oana Avasilichioaei complement and complicate her diction. Additional digital content from this issue includes video by Jesse Chun (screening until January 2022) and audio by Faith Nolan and the CUPE Freedom Singers.