The chapter addresses: 1. Overview of the Positivity Principle. 2. Theoretical Rationale for the Positivity Principle. 3. Empirical Rationale for the Positivity Principle. 4. Boundary Conditions for the Positivity Principle. 5. Applications of the Positivity Principle

Chapter 1 conceptualizes a primary form of racial doubt: questioning the equation of blackness with slavery. It is built around the testimony of Ben Newton, who declared he was born free in the United States, kidnapped at the age of ten, and subsequently enslaved in Cuba for several decades. It explores the degree to which racial doubt was intrinsic to the tension between racist agnosia (the social practice of actively ignoring exploited, racialized people) and anti-racist recognition (whereby some of these people could make themselves seen or heard). As Ben Newton pointed out when he reached the US consulate in 1853, “almost everybody” knew his story, but neither his owners nor the local authorities had felt pressured to liberate him. When he told this same story in a new context, recognition and freedom became less elusive. Through a focus on Ben’s testimony, the chapter charts the legal, practical, and linguistic terrains in which captives challenged their enslavement.

This chapter is concerned with Pindar’s poems as performance events, compounds of words, vocal melody, and instrumental music. My central claim is that such performances, as well as being events that are listened to, direct and refashion the act of listening. Following an overview of Pindar’s references to music, with which he positions himself as a creative participant in music’s still-developing history, I elaborate this claim in readings of Nemean 4, fr. 152, and Paean 8. In each of these texts, Pindar’s combinations of unusual diction, intertextuality, rhythmical framing, and other aspects of poetic form enable his audiences to listen to words and their meanings anew, and thereby to apprehend musical sound taking on fresh significance.

Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

During the colonial period, investment in India’s physical infrastructure far outpaced that in social sectors. In the first two decades of independence, political energy was focused on political consolidation and national self-sufficiency. Starting in the 1970s, attention shifted to basic needs. We trace the history of public-good provision over the four decades from 1971 to the latest census in 2011. We document the considerable expansion in public goods over this period and the variation in access across states. We illustrate how patterns of provision were the outcome of ‘top-down’ policy priorities interacting with ‘bottom-up’ processes of collective action. For scarce facilities, such as secondary schools, regions within states with political voice were most successful in obtaining access. We show that areas where secondary schooling expanded rapidly were also those where the most marginalized social groups among the Indian castes and tribes experienced social mobility.

Sound and hearing play a crucial role in the conceptualisation and perception of divine entities, cultic places, and ritual processes. Sound phenomena can evoke religious experiences, structure ritual communication and stimulate desired emotional responses, whilst exposure to certain resonance frequencies can affect the human body, thereby influencing one’s perceptions and states of consciousness. This essay analyses the Dodonean soundscape, exploring the potential affect of the various sonic experiences in relation to the process of consultation. In addition to the diverse sensory input from the natural environment, which in the case of Dodona is crucial, as it can be surmised from the traditional accounts of the oracular oak, special consideration is given to the chalkeion of Dodona, a remarkable sonic installation that offered one of the most unusual auditory experiences to the pilgrims. Based on the symbolic and sound properties of the chalkeion, it is possible to suggest that the soundscape at Dodona invited a form of ecstasy or meditation, with the potential to alter the focus of attention and consciousness, thus allowing for new forms of knowledge to become available.

Sephardi women in the Mediterranean, whose vocality was primarily confined to private spaces, used singing in situations of danger as a beacon to deploy networked connections of protection. Before the heritagization of Judeo-Spanish repertoire in the late twentieth century following massive emigrations from the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Balkans, female Sephardi voices were deployed as a manner of portable salon. This chapter demonstrates how women used their voices, and the cultural capital embedded within communicative functions of timbre, affect, volume, and silence to resist sexual aggression, assault, and coercion. Using two case studies from urban Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish, one from Bulgaria and the other from Morocco, this chapter unpacks how this intersectional minority deployed voice as a powerful creator of enclosed and safeguarding space. In these cases, women’s voices pushed their traditionally inner salons outwards, enacting a vocal protective shield semiotically prevalent in Sephardi communities.

In the preceding chapters we have presented Basque data related to several syntactic phenomena and constructions, namely the divide between unergatives and unaccusatives, addition of dative arguments, the variation attested in psych predicates, the causative/inchoative alternation, the impersonal construction, and the morphological causative. In this chapter we intend to explain briefly some of the theoretical approaches that can be adopted in order to account for some of the data presented. Specifically, we will offer an introduction to the syntactic derivation that gives rise to the alternations and variation presented so far. In Sections 8.2 and 8.3 we will explore the syntactic building blocks of verbs and the introduction of their arguments. In Section 8.4 the different types of Voice projections will be discussed. In Section 8.5 we will briefly mention implicit arguments and their (possible) semantic and syntactic nature. In Section 8.6 Applicative projections will be considered. In Section 8.7 the Voice-over-Voice configuration will be explored in order to account for the morphological causative construction and, finally, in Section 8.8 the main conclusions will be presented.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a great deal to say about listening, especially in contrast to looking. This Chapter demonstrates that in Pericles visual modes of perception are imbricated in regimes of power and exploitation, while audition is presented as a way out. When characters in the play lend their ears to sounds and voices that are all-too-often silenced, ignored, or drowned out – especially those belonging to women and the natural world – they are miraculously redeemed and regenerated. Marina’s voice, in particular, drives the drama toward its happy conclusion. To account for the power of her voice, I turn to Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and David Kleinberg-Levin, each of whom takes aim at the oppressiveness of logocentrism, celebrating instead the enlivening energies of the pre-semantic and extra-verbal. As do these authors, Pericles associates the plenipotent voice of the play with the feminine, the more-than-human, and the beyond-meaning, indicating that these can usher us into productive and ethical relationships with others and our world.

This Chapter considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are located within bodies. It shows how the patricians situate their voices in the “worthier” parts of the body and the citizens’ voices in the “worser,” leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens’. Nevertheless, the voices in this play are highly mobile. They repeatedly move about within bodies and between bodies, undercutting the patricians’ conservative approach and allowing us to envision radical alternatives. Invoking work by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, the Chapter concludes by fleshing out these radical alternatives.

This Chapter examines the ways Prospero vocally projects his authority in The Tempest, either on his own or in conjunction with other entities. It unpacks the vast range of vocal tricks Prospero uses to gain and wield power over others, especially his disgruntled slave, Caliban. Drawing on the work of Jennifer Lynn Stoever, it shows how Prospero imposes and enforces a “sonic color line” that punishes Caliban’s vocal difference in a way that enacts racial oppression through the ear. To the degree that it does this, the play chillingly anticipates racialized listening practices that remain with us today. Nevertheless, the play’s conclusion gives us reason to believe that Prospero perhaps comes to recognize, regret, and even repent of his vocal tyranny. Though the drama stops short of enacting a truly ethical dialogue, this possibility calls out to us, albeit faintly, at the end of the play.