Brought to Life by the Voice

"This book is a major contribution to South Asian Studies, sound and music studies, anthropology, and film and media studies, offering original research and new theoretical insights to each of these disciplines. There is no other scholarly work that approaches voice and technology in a way that is both as theoretically wide-ranging and as locally specific."--Neepa Majumdar, author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s "Brought to Life by the Voice provides a detailed and highly convincing historical and ethnographic exploration of the varying links between the singing voice and the body in the Tamil film industry since the mid-twentieth century. Amanda Weidman demonstrates how the affordances of playback technology were deployed in different ways that often run counter to the assumption of body-voice unity that is widespread in North Atlantic contexts, highlighting the fragmentation of body and voice instead. The historical and ethnographic analysis the book presents is meticulous and excellent."--Patrick Eisenlohr, author of Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World