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Driving in southern Arizona, with Google Maps on high volume, you hear the racial stratification of the foothills before you reach the entrance to the gated community: "Calle sin Controversia. " "Corta dei Fiori. " "Camino sin Puente. " Do the residents here know how to pronounce these street names, intended by some zealous neighborhood planner to signal regional authenticity? Siri can't say them, at least not in her default, American accent. She can "voice" Australian, British, Indian, Irish, or South African English, she can "be" male or female, but you realize, playing around with these settings, that it is harder to change your settings. You're always going to listen for what Siri doesn't say, for the "j" that doesn't massage her double "ll, " for the mis-stressed syllable.II. "Hello, is this Somalia Gelatin?" Philadelphia-based filmmaker Sonali Gulati was accustomed to hearing her name butchered at the coffee shop, at the doctor's office, and by the salesperson phoning predictably at dinnertime. One day she received a call from a telemarketer who called herself "Nancy Smith" but then, improbably, pronounced her name perfectly. She was actually Nalini and lived in Gulati's hometown, New Delhi. Bay Area-based novelist Bharati Mukherjee had similar experiences of surprise telephonic recognition. She felt deep kinship with these customer service representatives, whom she heard as fellow Indians attempting to accommodate American listeners, as she had, in her writing, accommodated American readers. 1 With the advent of business process outsourcing (BPO) in the early 2000s, many South Asians in America began to have aural encounters with agents calling from India, who knew perfectly well how to say their names and who reset the terms of the call from the first word, "Hallo. " III. Matt Maxey performs American Sign Language (ASL) translations of popular songs on his YouTube channel, Deafinitely Dope. Maxey is a Deaf Black man. REFR AMING AC CENTColloquially, an accent is a phonological index of one's identity. The Oxford English Dictionary defines accent as "a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. " 14 In linguist Rosina Lippi-Green's much-cited definition, accent is "a way of speaking, " tethered, of course, to the body that speaks. 15 Accent names a geographically and socially grounded manner of speaking while acting as a set of punctuation marks. Accent, in other words, is supposed to signify to some "us" some "them, " to some "me" some "you. "Definitions like these miss the polysemic and inherently comparative character of accent. Accent does more than denote; it calls out modes of relation, of speaking and listening, laying bare the very logics of representation, identity, and interpretation. Vocal and visual stresses are typically understood to distinguish particular bodies when, in fact, difference only emerges through comparison. An accent is an accent precisely because it stands apart from what surrounds it. 16 By the same token, its relations ...

This coda highlights in the term “Anglophone” a productive emphasis on the speakers and speaking of English. “Speaker”—as technology, people—reminds us that the speakers of English across the world may have varying levels of competence. It also draws attention to the fundamental role of tekhne in the inflection of the phonic (what is spoken) and the sonic (what is heard). In the present global conjuncture, especially, performances of racialized voices, accents, and “skin tones” materialize in a fundamentally biopolitical terrain of listening. The coda proposes that we draw on these mediated and embodied phonic meanings of the word “Anglophone” to consolidate a reading practice that is attuned to the mundane world and that hears marginalized voices in Anglophone studies and India alike.