How do we hear the Other in documentary cinema? How is the Other constituted as such, as a figure of difference and dispossession, located at some distance from the modern self? How is the listening subject—the “I” that listens to the speech of those “others”—instantiated at the top of raciolinguistic hierarchies? What formal devices do documentaries use to position the listener as the locus of neutrality? 

Rangan’s name for the normative listening habits that documentary cinema has instituted over time is the “documentary audit.” She traces the colonial roots of this structure in a series of promotional and educational films produced by the British General Post Office (GPO) unit in the 1930s. Films such as Cable Ship (1933), 6:30 Collection (1934), and The Song of Ceylon (1934) are typically dismissed as publicity reels for the Crown’s telecommunication service or as minor experiments that pale in comparison to the more formally adventurous, modernist films of John Grierson and Alberto Cavalcanti, both of whom headed the GPO unit in the interwar period. But, in fact, it is in these and other early GPO films that the conventions that have, for some, become synecdoches for documentary (e.g., voiceover commentary, recorded speech, overheard conversations) were piloted. In tandem with schools, elocution, print, and radio, the GPO unit helped establish Received Pronunciation (RP)—that “placeless” accent sometimes called BBC English—as a vocal ideal for the nation. It is not just that film after GPO film uses voiceovers rendered in RP; what is crucial is how other voices are situated in relation to that ideal. As an invisible but audible and authoritative entity, the acousmatic voiceover performs abstract narratorial functions: It anchors, interprets, contextualizes, and comments on the unfolding story. By contrast, the “on-screen ‘accented’ speakers serve concrete demonstrative or illustrative functions” (41). In effect, the unseen, masculine voiceover adopts an “accentuating style,” denying its own situated, embodied quality and placing ethnic and racial minorities and working-class subjects lower on a raciolinguistic scale. Audiences are enjoined to inhabit the supremely entitled locus of the narrator, auditing the world as if from “an objective or neutral listening vantage” (37). In this way does documentary cinema birth the “other,” all in the name of liberal humanist curiosity and tolerance. 

In historicizing the auditory vantage point into which documentary audiences are disciplined, Rangan amplifies the emphasis on location that emerges in recent studies of accent and listening. Place, she reminds us, has a history. The “neutral” position that viewer-listeners occupy has been consolidated over the course of a century. Attention to the colonial infrastructures that continue to sustain the documentary audit also opens up decolonial—and crip—possibilities that the history of the form itself and extant scholarship seem to foreclose. For one, it inspires a broader, non-audist conception of listening, one that is not wedded to the operations of the ear. In shuttling between sonic, visual, and textual details—from selective subtitling and captioning to closely miked voiceovers to sensual details of film soundscapes—Rangan demonstrates that the entrenchment of raciolinguistic hierarchies happens not just in the soundtrack, but also in the visual domain. To challenge the documentary audit, Rangan offers another multimodal concept: “accented interlistening.” She builds here on Lisbeth Lipari’s notion of interlistening, which casts listening, speaking, and thinking as thoroughly entangled processes.  For Lipari, “Listening itself is a kind of speaking that resonates with the echo of everything we have heard, thought, seen, touched, said, and read throughout our lives” (quoted in Rangan, 73). The figure of the listener is certainly present in Lipari’s formulation. What Rangan does is remind us of the accented ear of that listener. 

Consider Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s audio documentary The Freedom of Speech Itself (2012). It deploys many familiar elements of the documentary audit: voiceovers, talking heads, subtitles, and captions. But it does so in ways that question essentialist ideas about language, race, ethnicity, and national identity. Midway through Abu Hamdan’s piece comes a friendly chat in which the filmmaker attempts to pin down where his interlocutor is from by inquiring about his accent. This is exactly the kind of “forensic listening,” the “frisking” of speech (64), that state authorities engage in when trying to determine whether an asylum seeker’s claim about their “homeland” matches their speech patterns. A ludicrous conversation unfolds from the question “Where are you from?” Palestine, a refugee camp in Lebanon, Dubai, Hackney, Hollywood—all of these places shape his tongue. Accent is not a stable marker of identity so much as “a biography of migration” (Abu Hamdan quoted in Rangan, 25). So too is the way we listen. How might our listening practices account for these truths? How might we listen not just for an accent, as documentary and other cultural forms teach us, but also with an accent? That is, how might we listen with the awareness that we are always already listening—and speaking and reading and otherwise interpreting aural data—from an embodied, historically situated position?

I carry these questions into the multimedia artist Jay Afrisando’s Aural Architecture. The video installation, which I first encountered at ARTJOG 2024, hosted by the Jogja National Museum in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, uses a multiscreen array to depict a man signing and a woman vocalizing a variety of sounds. Some sounds are onomatopoeic (e.g., “whoosh”), others more abstract and evocative (e.g., “soft silence,” “ordinary silence”). With the sound and image of the multiscreens synchronized, the two people seem to be expressing the same sonic concept. The sounds are ostensibly translated via two sets of subtitles, with English sitting atop Bahasa Indonesia (e.g., “[boing]/[pantul]”). My tentativeness in the preceding sentences (signaled by words like seem and ostensibly) arises from the fact that the apparent synchrony of what we see and hear in Aural Architecture—the alignment of sound and image across the multi-/split screens—is a product of editing. The performers were given an “aural list in the form of [English] text” and asked to interpret the list independently of each other. During the editing process, Afrisando used that initial list for the captions and added subtitles in Indonesian. The version for his 2024–25 DAAD residency in Berlin used German subtitles as well.{1} 

As I watched and listened to Aural Architecture, the subtle disjunctures and shifting relationships between various instantiations of an apparently singular sound prompted a host of questions about listening and embodiment: Why do I (expect to) perceive a sound—or a voice or an accent—in a particular way? What alternative forms might that sound take, how else might it be experienced? Putting multiple sounds and at least three languages in play (ASL, English, and Indonesian), Aural Architecture coaxes audiences to recognize their “listening vantage and the asymmetrical relational exchange among accented speaker and listeners” (20). In other words, the “dismediated” aesthetics of this installation—the way it thinks disability and media together—inspire accented interlistening.{2} With English positioned above Indonesian, the text onscreen also makes visible colonial raciolinguistic hierarchies that structure the Anglophone listening ear. And yet, how interesting that many of the English words are emphatically sonic. Which language and whose language is usually deemed to be all sound, all sensation, all accent—too much sound, too little meaning? How is that logic upturned in Afrisando’s work? The multilingual, sensory text in this piece incites a rethinking of the boundaries and relationship between language and sound. In prompting a dialogic relationship between images, and between image, text, and sound, Aural Architecture brings me right back to The Documentary Audit: I listen, “receptive to how that which [I do] not understand can reveal [my] hitherto-unknown preconceptions and open up new itineraries” (73).

* The Spatial Audit, Tory Jeffay
* Outlaw Communities of Care, LaCharles Ward