UC Irvine

Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media, argues that the seemingly outmoded cultural phenomenon of ventriloquism is a key site for understanding Western anxieties about media and mediation at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ventriloquism achieved mainstream popularity in the Vaudevillian era through its comedic dramatizations of the foibles of everyday communication. Subsequently translated into the audiovisual contexts of phonography, film, and television, the art boasts a growing plethora of media afterlives, while also serving as political shorthand for the mechanical reproduction of another’s speech. Anachronism Effects insists that ventriloquism’s circulation as a popular metaphor, and continued prevalence as a form of contemporary entertainment, offers a unique template for tracing the transmissions of power and knowledge through diverse media platforms, as well as through racialized, gendered, and queer bodies, in the information age—even as the practice continues to evoke the cultural detritus of a prior historical moment.

Anachronism Effects thus attends to the myriad ways in which ventriloquism has evolved as a distinct cultural object, as the art of “saying what people want to say but can’t say” by displacing this unspeakable or unsavory speech onto a dummy. From the radically race-critical 1970s vinyl record albums of the African-American ventriloquist duo Richard and Willie; to the late 1980s-early 1990s lip-synch scandal wrought by the “ventriloquism” of the Afro-German pop group Milli Vanilli; to the contemporary televisual, cinematic, and multimedia performances of the self-deprecating British ventriloquist Nina Conti and her jingoistic American counterparts Terry Fator and Jeff Dunham, the project’s case studies illuminate what it means to “vent” in both senses of the term, particularly in the context of the perceived dynamics of silencing or “correctness” that often accompanies contemporary political discourse. The dissertation’s initial case studies notably coalesce around highly politicized celebrations of national history (the mid-1970s U.S. Bicentennial, the early 1990s “reunification” of Germany), while its later chapters take up post-9/11 U.S. fantasies of a return to a folkloric national past. In each instance, ventriloquism’s play with the alignments and disconnections between body and voice enacts a material working-through of the temporal contradictions elided by national historical discourses.