Brought to Life by the Voice : : Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India / / Amanda Weidman.

• Superior document: South Asia Across the Disciplines
• VerfasserIn: Weidman, Amanda J., 1970-
• Place / Publishing House: [s.l.] : : University of California Press,, 2021.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: South Asia Across the Disciplines
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers' voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman's historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration and Spelling -- Introduction: Theorizing Playback -- Part I. Prehistories -- 1. Trading Voices: The Gendered Beginnings of Playback -- Part II. Playback's Dispensation -- 2. "A Leader for All Song": Making a Dravidian Voice -- 3. Ambiguities of Animation: On Being "Just the Voice" -- 4. The Sacred and the Profane: Economies of the (Il)licit -- Part III. Afterlives -- 5. The Raw and the Husky: On Timbral Qualia and Ethnolinguistic Belonging -- 6. Anxieties of Embodiment: Liveness and Deadness in the New Dispensation -- 7. Antiplayback -- Notes -- References -- Index