Chapter 5 - Performative Accents

Summary

This chapter thinks about ways that language is lived interstitially – between registers, accents, national histories, and personal travels – as something that (embarrassingly) always spills out or crops up when one is least ready for it to do so, revealing or mis-revealing a particular linguistic genealogy. Looking closely at Québécois poet Michèle Lalonde’s iconic 1967 poem-manifesto Speak White, and various recorded performances of this poem by speakers offering distinctive manners of accenting or pronouncing the bilingual (English–French) relations and agonisms enacted in the poem, this chapter further reflects autoethnographically or autocritically at ways the author’s own transnational and hybrid relation to these languages further helps to complicate national and international narratives. At once personal and political, historical, and critical, the chapter reflects on ways that language performatively offers an affective archive of one’s embodied and ancestral trajectories, and fails ever quite to account for how we experience the migrations and misalignments of our everyday.