Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles, 2002 IDRF Fellow Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity. Buy it on Amazon.

Publication Details

Title
The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia
Authors
Fisher, Daniel
Publisher
Duke University / Duke University Press
Publish Date
2016
ISBN
9780822360896
Citation
Fisher, Daniel, The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia (Duke University / Duke University Press, 2016).
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