Thinking with an Accent

California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media #3

by C.S. Rangan

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit to learn more.

Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.

334 pages, Paperback

First published February 21, 2023

Reviews

[Prisha]

dropped // introduction is incredibly interesting and so are the first few chapters, but it quickly becomes repetitive