Abstract: The role of voice as an enabling grounds of democratic self-determination hinges on its status as a reliable index and medium of the people’s will. A potential crisis in this arrangement, though, is introduced by voices that register as delinked from their putative sources. Multiple disembodied, augmented, or acousmatic voices and noises circulate throughout Pauline Hopkins’s novel 1902–03 Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self ; at the heart of the novel is the soprano Dianthe, whose relationships to her voice, agency, and consciousness are continually in flux. In Of One Blood , Hopkins marshals recent developments in psychological research and her career-long interest in the human voice, mediated through the novel’s polyvocal tendencies, to imagine a nonsingular—yet not fully impersonal—mode of consciousness and selfhood that, Hopkins proposes, can effectively dramatize the confining frameworks of race and gender, and can suggest ways of escaping America altogether.
Sara Marcus (Sun,) studied this question.