The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Taking the notion of the ‘mechanic’ as its starting point, this chapter outlines how an interest in the mechanic and scientific aspects of speech production is a pervasive feature of Romantic-era treatments of spoken utterance. The chapter investigates the numerous contemporary senses of the term ‘mechanic’, to highlight these senses’ common concern with physical movement, whether of the human hands, a constructed machine, or the material world. It examines how Romantic innovations in the theory of speech production which present utterance as a form of motion – of bodies, of machines, and of matter itself – combine, engage with, and react to traditions of materialist philosophy and elocution teaching and explores how such studies of speech rely on blending knowledge-based fields of study with traditionally non-theoretical practices including medicine and elocution.

This chapter proposes that Hopkins’s poems are distinctive in being actively and vividly addressed – to their subjects, to the imagined reader, and to God – or, at times, in staging forms of address that seem to have gone awry. The suggestion is that Hopkins makes poetic address morally vital; its turns and complexities map social, moral, and theological terrain.

This chapter considers the syntax of Hopkins’s poems. It places Hopkins’s syntax in the context of his devotional and artistic life, showing how his sentences negotiate the conflicting pressures exerted by Catholic faith and poetic ambition, personal idiosyncrasy, and the desire to be ‘intelligible’. It also places the poems in the context of larger syntactical trends, showing how Hopkins’s phrasing works with and against the grain of nineteenth-century usage, and addressing Hopkins’s interest in and anticipation of developments in Victorian philology. The chapter pays particular attention to ‘Myself Unholy’, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’.

Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

This chapter argues that the spoken word had special significance in the Russian literary tradition due to censorship and other constraints on the printed word, and also because of the cultural chasm between a small, educated elite and a weakly literate majority. It begins with Baroque rhetoric in the eighteenth century before examining the role of oral performance and rhetoric in the Romantic era. It then shows a reinvigoration of literature’s oral dimension from the reform era of the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, as writers became public readers of their work and the educated elite sought to render a popular ‘voice’ in literary form. Following a repressive hiatus in the Stalin period, the spoken word had its heyday in the postwar era: guitar poetry, a popular form of urban folklore, entered the field of literature, while poets achieved national fame as performers as well as published authors.

Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

The focus of this chapter is Francophone Haitian women writers. These are writers who are bound by a common idiom, French and/or Creole, and who share similar concerns. What is to be ascertained is whether they occupy a territory in which literature acquires its full meaning. Given the dominance of male writers in Haitian literature, women writers may appear as marginal figures or minor voices. However, what this chapter demonstrates is that women writers have, over many years, challenged the status quo by simply being present and making their voices heard. They offer a female-centered perspective on the tensions and contradictions of Haitian society and, as such, open new doors to imagination. Dealing with such themes as love, loss, otherness, memory, and empathy, Haitian women writers have effectively affirmed the humanistic value of literature. The term écriture de l’urgence, coined by Yanick Lahens to define Haitian literature in general, acquires a special meaning when considering women authors. Urgency does not equate haste. Rather, it refers to the direct confrontation of the writer with reality, history, and the endless possibilities of language.

This chapter outlines a novel, rigorous method for studying literary recordings, which can support a paradigm shift in the study of literature as performance. The method incorporates leading-edge, open-source digital tools for analyzing speech patterns in recordings, and an ethically grounded approach to analysis, with attention to the neuroscience of speech perception, implicit bias in listening, and relevant theories of sound studies and voice studies. It also includes an overview of our own work on poetry recordings and of related developments in digital voice studies, and speculates about future directions for this research.