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This chapter starts by asking who speaks, who listens, and who reads. It also states that far from being incidental, the instrumental language of an absent subject has created a pervasive tone. From professional jargons to street languages, people everywhere perpetually stylize their use of language but this dynamic of linguistic innovation take on new qualities of social resistance. Many formal features of the text are only barely audible in an oral presentation, for instance in terms of the shape of lines, stanzas, or paragraphs on the page. The presentation of personality represents the particular element of all open readings that separates it from nearly all other like public performances in our society.

This chapter reviews the mechanisms that allow animals and humans to judge the distances of sound sources. It starts by describing the processes that cause a sound source to be perceived outside the head. Information used to detect the distance of a sound source is discussed under three headings: monaural cues, binaural cues, and dynamic cues arising from the movement of the source. There follows an account of auditory aftereffects and interactions between audition and vision as manifested in effects such as ventriloquism. The chapter ends with a review of echolocation in bats and marine mammals and a review of the lateral-line system of fish.

This chapter offers, as a kind of afterthought, a reference to Tertullian’s account of genital speech. The reference here is to Denis Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets of 1748. It tells the story of Mangogul, the bored sultan of an imaginary oriental kingdom. Diderot’s conception forms a intriguing compromise between archaic and modern conceptions of ventriloquism. During the 18th century, attention shifted away from the experience of the one possessed towards the powers of the ventriloquist who is believed to be capable of capturing others' voices through imitation and then ‘throwing’ his or her (but almost always his) imitations away from himself and into others. This is a move from a voice that enters to a voice that is thrown or projected. During the 18th century, the dominant explanation of ventriloquism as the appropriation of one’s voice by another shifted to the idea of the appropriation of another’s voice for oneself.

During the 18th century ventriloquism became subject to processes of tireless explanation and demythologisation. This chapter sees that ventriloquism becomes subject to a huge overestimation, both in terms of the danger that its exercise could pose, and in terms of the demythologizing power of the explanations of its effect. The will-to-belief and the will-to-disbelief are tightly clasped together. The most famous and influential of these debunking works is Le Ventriloque, ou l'engastrimythe, a long, rambling, but impressively compendious review of the history of ventriloquism by the Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle, published in 1772. Little is known about the life of its author. La Chapelle’s title suggests that he was originally orthodox and conservative in his religious beliefs. The fact that he maintained the position of royal censor of books for most of his life also suggests that he was never a man to take political risks.

It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the topic within one of the earliest novels of the new American republic. It is also important to remember that this was the period in which ventriloquism was beginning to find its place within what would become a culture of mass entertainment. It was to be expected that the growing tendency for ventriloquism to take a narrative form would result in its appearance in more developed narratives. However, it was scarcely to be expected that a young American writer, determined to assist in the formation of a distinctively American form of novel in the early days of the new republic, would make ventriloquism the centrepiece of his work. However, this is precisely what Charles Brockden Brown did in Wieland, Or The Transformation: An American Tale.

During this time Ventriloquists tended to operate in the open rather than in concert halls or theatres. Ventriloquism was generally exhibited at fairs, or such places, for money. For five years Alexandre Vattemare toured through much of Northern Europe. He began what was to be a run of nearly 200 performances at the newly renamed Adelphi Theatre in the Strand in London. For this purpose, Vattemare had engaged the services of W. T. Moncrieff, the pseudonym of William Thomas, a writer of popular melodramas and burlettas. The result was an entertainment entitled The Adventures of a Ventriloquist: or, The Rogueries of Nicholas. The title-page offered ‘An entirely new Comic, Characteristic, Vocalic, Mimitic, Multiformical, Maniloquous, Ubiquitarical Entertainment’, and advertisements promised the whole performance would be ‘embodied, illustrated and delivered by Monsieur Alexandre, assisted by Vox, et Praeterea Nihil’.

Charles Mathews, a long-established comic actor, had first presented his one man show in London in 1818. The show was strung loosely together around a series of recitations, dialogues, sketches, and songs, all of them performed by Mathews himself. The governing structure of the evening’s entertainment was usually that of a journey, or in later years of a journey through Mathews’s own reminiscences. When Alexandre Vattemare began performing his Adventures of a Ventriloquist, Mathews had just opened with The Youthful Days of Mr Mathews, an entertainment organized around Mathews’s personal reminiscences of various comic types and incidents. Mathews supplemented his highly-developed powers of mimicry with ventriloquism, a skill which he had first acquired while working with a theatrical company in Swansea between 1795 and 1797. Ventriloquism featured most often in the ‘monopolylogue’ with which Mathews’s entertainments usually concluded after 1819.

Alexandre Vattemare’s corporeal performance escapes all attempts to do justice to it in words, but relies upon the supplement of words for the disclosure of this transcendence of words. The more overblown the poems discussed in this chapter are, the closer they nudge towards parody of their own extravagance. The poems appear to take revenge on Monsieur Alexandre for evoking the desire to take him as seriously as the poems evidence. This slight wavering of tone is the mark of that ambivalence which this chapter suggests would go on to characterize ventriloquism up to this day, in which the very ludicrousness of ventriloquism as a spectacle may be in part what allows us to hope that there might really be such a thing as ventriloquism, as opposed to the pretence of it, that there might be in actuality an art to correspond to our imperious, infantile fantasies of ventriloquial power.

The conception of power articulated, as discussed in this chapter, is interesting. The idea of the reach of the voice seems to emphasize its power to remain itself over distances that would ordinarily weaken or diffuse it. However, the reach of the voice is also associated with its ability to multiply itself into different forms. The ventriloquial voice is powerful both because it is able to retain its individuality and because it is able to lose it. Perhaps co-operating with this conception of the self-transformative voice is the idea of the voice of the castrato or falsetto voice, the idea, in other words, of a male voice whose power comes from its capacity to incorporate a female register; the castrato voice was never heard as ‘feminine’ or emasculated. The guides to ventriloquism which multiplied in the latter half of the 19th century similarly emphasize the qualities of strength and vigour required of the voice, along with the necessity of continuous care for the vocal organs.

From the earliest times, the history of ventriloquism has been shadowed by the history of attempts to create automata capable of simulating or actually replicating speech. The history of efforts to create such talking automata, usually in the form of talking heads, is a long one that is dogged with failure and compensatory eruptions of rumour and fantasy. Prior to the medieval period, mechanical means — the use of pipes, tubes and concealed confederates — were often used to convince the credulous in various cultures and at various times of the magical power of speaking busts or idols. Stories have also abounded of heads made able to speak by demonic magic. Perhaps the founding myth of the talking head is to be found in Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay of 1594.

Ventriloquism has had its day. Even when revivals of ventriloquism occur, as in the recent success of David Strassman, it takes a necromantic form. In his performances, Strassman plays both with the magical and the technological prehistory of ventriloquism. However this history is a history relayed through 20th-century media, especially films like Dead of Night, Devil Doll, Magic, and The Exorcist. Animatronic technology allows Strassman to break the physical link between performer and dummy that has always been so important in ventriloquial performance. The difficulty of assigning a precise date or determining moment to these films, which run together the familiar power that the sound film has to separate voice from the body, with dreads and delights of a much more ancient vintage, is intensified by the fact that the new phase of the media-supernatural characteristic of the 1990s itself depended upon a revival of this earlier period of media history.

By analyzing confessions of faith, puritan sermons, and catechisms, this chapter examines the processes by which whites placed words into the mouths of blacks and Native Americans. Through this form of “ventriloquism,” I argue, puritan clergy controlled their neighbors of color. By “ventriloquism” the chapter does not imply that Africans and Indians never spoke for themselves. They certainly did. By looking over the shoulders of the seemingly silent, however, this chapter illustrates both the agency of New Englanders of color and the ways whites often struggled to control their voices as they constructed racial identities for them.

This chapter takes up questions of literary ventriloquism and surrogate authorship that always plagued the slave narrative and are imaginatively reinvented by such black Atlantic writers as Toni Morrison and Caryl Phillips in their revisiting of Shakespeare’s Othello. To do so, they return to the founding scene of the “Talking Book” of the Atlantic slave narrative, where the slave worries that the master’s book will not speak to him or her. Staging a range of responses to analogy, these writers place slavery next to colonialism and the Holocaust, renovating but also complicating a classic postcolonial project of writing back to the empire in order to decolonize the mind. Their explorations return us to the meaning of slavery itself, its singularity, its relation to narrative, and to modern conceptions of racial formation. Such efforts transform the classic project of writing back to the text of Western authority, evenly negotiating the pull of influence, intertextuality, and adaptation.

This chapter takes on the trope of the poet’s voice, via James Merrill’s monumental poem The Changing Light at Sandover, which incorporates large swaths of voices from beyond the grave, dictated to him through the Ouija board. The argument is that by channeling composite, occult voices, Merrill’s experiment results in a sustained dismantling of a lyric voice. Sandover makes manifest the language of possession, animism, and ventriloquism shadowing modern theoretical approaches to poetic voice: as something physical, given breath and sound by the poet or reader; as a metaphor for an author’s distinctive style; or as a reductionist cliché equivalent to the self. In so doing, Sandover confounds any normative grasp of the voice in modern poetry while substantiating the uncanny truths on which the chronic enigma of poetic voice depends.

Chapter Three further elaborates ventriloquism as, firstly, an expression of Francoist anxiety of subaltern rebellion by children and colonial subjects and, secondly, as a tool for the transmission of traditional gender roles. Tómbola (Lucía 1962) is a retelling of Aesop’s ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ with a sinister subtext that reveals the ideological function of the cine con niño and Francoism’s political use of children, both of which reverberate extra-diegetically in the biography of its star Marisol (Pepa Flores). This chapter explores the appropriative ventriloquism in the abduction of Marisol’s voice and body, a result of her short-lived carnivalesque resistance, followed by Pepa Flores’ star-text and its portrayal in a 2009 biopic mini-series. Marisol’s paternalism towards her Spanish-African best friend, likely from the territory of Equatorial Guinea, supports an allegorical analysis of the biopolitics of Spanish colonialism in Africa. The Two cines understands colonialism as another form of appropriation; Marisol’s sidekick María Belén is, effectively, the dummy’s dummy.

In this chapter the author listens through new materialism to animals’ voices in various art assemblages. Theoretically, ethically, and politically, new materialism opens up a recognition of the specificity, singularity and entanglements of animals voices with others. The author brings a range of works into conversation with theories of affect, attunement, assemblage; becoming-animal and ventriloquism. The chapter traverses an enchanted terrain in which animal voices speak themselves and speak a variety of relationships with people, animals and things, in and out of assemblages. These voices in media and art works speak to and with animal studies and new materialism, bringing forth understandings that are enchanting, engaging, disturbing, and curious.

This chapter studies Dead of Night's most potent and well-remembered story, ‘Ventriloquist's Dummy’ directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. The peculiar three-way relationship between the ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave), his dummy ‘Hugo’, and rival ventriloquist Sylvester Kee (Hartley Power) raises many fascinating issues concerning masculinity. Indeed, this relationship has come to be regarded as a metaphorical homosexual love triangle. If one reads the ‘courtship’ of Frere by Kee as being indirectly enacted through his interest in Hugo, it is straightforward enough. What makes the theme more compelling is Frere's tortured jealousy of his Hugo persona. The chapter then traces the origins of bestowing animacy upon inanimate objects and the relationship this has to the concept of the Uncanny. It also considers the ‘fourth man’ in this story, the ‘doubting Thomas’ psychiatrist Doctor Van Straaten (Frederick Valk), responsible for the telling of the tale and the rational foil to Walter Craig and the other guests throughout the film as they share their respective supernatural experiences.

This chapter talks about the epistemic support of ASB. It attempts to define ASB, while stating that obscurity is an important tool of governance. The main theme of this chapter is the role of vernacular and technical language in building and legitimising intervention. The discussion extends the governing coalition of ASB to incorporate housing professionals and different housing management mechanisms, which are increasingly arranged beyond the social housing tenure and the judiciary. The chapter shows that these two are able to provide an ‘interpretative ventriloquism’, which reinforces the predominant political and social ‘common-sense’ discourse around ASB.

The second chapter broadens our understanding of the mediascape during the golden age of Argentine cinema by examining the film and radio stardom of Marina Esther Traverso, “Niní Marshall,” as a case of aural stardom that challenges image-based star studies and provides a framework to consider the particularities of popular Argentine cinema, in which radio furnished the framework for the development of its industry and star system. Star-contract disputes from studio archives and evolving sound conventions in film texts are ventriloquial gambits that rearticulate the relationship between voice and body in a shifting organization of the senses. In Marshall’s film, the actress is the site of multiples selves that surface differentially in relation to the image. Marshall is never quite in synch, is never quite embodied, is never quite diegeticized. This failure to diegeticize mocks a Hollywood classicism that differentiated diegetic and non-diegetic sound in order to secure a narrative space distinct from the theatrical space.