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Engineering the decolonial voice

Infrastructural audibility and Taigi dubbing in Taiwan

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Abstract
This article develops the concept of infrastructural audibility to theorize the conditions under which marginalized linguistic forms become audible to institutions — recognizable, reproducible, and capable of circulating within structured domains calibrated for dominant languages. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan’s Taigi (Taiwanese) dubbing industry, I trace how practitioners pursuing an explicitly decolonial revitalization project reproduce, through the material practices of recording, the very standardizing hierarchies they are mobilized against. Analysis of correction sequences, the consolidation of linguistic authority in the language specialist (láosu), and practitioners’ accounts of what professional elevation requires demonstrates that decolonial linguistic projects seeking broadcast reach do not escape standardization; they mobilize it strategically as a condition of infrastructural audibility. The result is not a dismantling of anonymous linguistic authority but its multiplication: alongside the Mandarin broadcast norm, a nascent Taigi broadcast register is being engineered through the same infrastructural logic that constituted Mandarin’s authority. Achieving audibility within an inherited apparatus is never simply a matter of being heard; it is a matter of being rendered compatible with norms whose genealogy is colonial, and the cost of that compatibility is borne, unevenly, by the language and the speakers working to keep it alive.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Dubbing, decolonization, and the politics of sound in Taiwan
  • 2.Taigi and the stratification of linguistic value
  • 3.Theoretical framework: Standardization, colonial infrastructure, and heritage language
  • 4.Fieldwork in Taiwan’s dubbing industry
  • 5.Analysis: Correction, authority, and the production of broadcast taigi
  • 6.Conclusion: Decolonization and its infrastructure
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (44)
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