Unruly Speech

Unruly Speech explores how Uyghurs in China and in the diaspora transgress sociopolitical limits with "unruly" communication practices in a quest for change. Drawing on research in China, the United States, and Germany, Saskia Witteborn situates her study against the backdrop of displacement and shows how naming practices and witness accounts become potent ways of resistance in everyday interactions and in global activism. Featuring the voices of Uyghurs from three continents, Unruly Speech analyzes the discursive and material force of place names, social media, surveillance, and the link between witnessing and the discourse on human rights. The book provides a granular view of disruptive communication: its global political moorings and socio-technical control. The rich ethnographic study will appeal to audiences interested in migration and displacement, language and social interaction, advocacy, digital surveillance, and a transnational China.

The words of this book are based upon Christ’s declaration: “I am the way, the truth, and the life . . .” St. John 14:6. This Holy Ghost inspired book will have every reader reexamining their faith in Christ, their walk in God, and even the way they currently display God’s Agape love in this world.I am come unto you as a friend, and truly I write unto you in much fear and trembling in the Holy Ghost. I come not in mine own name, but in the name of him who has sent me to testify unto the truth; and in him is no lie, even he which is Jesus Christ, our Lord. Now there is utterly a fault in the church from the least to the greatest: those who preach haven’t been sent to preach, and those who teach have not the anointing; and those who prophesy unto you have prophesied a lie because they have altogether deceived the people; and because of your carrying away you shall be one with their damnation.While reading this book, you shall learn the truth of your God and Creator, and of his Son, Jesus Christ. You shall learn how to identify the voice of God in your hearing, and how he speaks to you. You will learn how and why the Lord, God is so attached to man, and why he loves man so much. You will learn why you must be born again; moreover, you will discover what it is you need to do (what's your part in the kingdom of God) to truly be a light to others in this world.You will discover the reason why both faith and love are the keys to life in the kingdom of God, and the role they play in salvation. You will learn how to properly utilize and deploy your faith in a powerful new way. And even though you might know the basics of faith, today you will learn why its works have been a great mystery to the church. Today we will unlock this mystery together, and you will find that you now, not only can please God, but that you will also learn how easy it is for you to do his will and overcome all things by faith. You will also learn who your heavenly Father really is, as you come to realize that he has been waiting a long to meet you.Above all else, you will learn the reasons why the miracles, spoken of in St. Mark 16:16-18., are not occurring in the church today, and why the ministers and preachers of our day have not been bringing forth the word with signs following as had the apostles. You will be taught many things that you may have never been taught in the church, or have been taught improperly; such as the Constancy, the Fidelity, and the Faithfulness of God in the reality of himself. You will learn not only what these words mean, but you will learn how to apply them to your life as you grow in Christ. Little children, I am only asking of you is to listen to his voice today. This book is a book of instructions given in hopes of making "YOU ALL" true Disciples of Christ. My one and only prayer for you all is that you don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn the truth about your heavenly Father, so that you do not go, The Impossible Way.

Sandy Bardsley examines the complex relationship between speech and gender in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and engages debates on the static nature of women's status after the Black Death. Focusing on England, Venomous Tongues uses a combination of legal, literary, and artistic sources to show how deviant speech was increasingly feminized in the later Middle Ages. Women of all social classes and marital statuses ran the risk of being charged as scolds, and local jurisdictions interpreted the label "scold" in a way that best fit their particular circumstances. Indeed, Bardsley demonstrates, this flexibility of definition helped to ensure the longevity of the term: women were punished as scolds as late as the early nineteenth century. The tongue, according to late medieval moralists, was a dangerous weapon that tempted people to sin. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerics railed against blasphemers, liars, and slanderers, while village and town elites prosecuted those who abused officials or committed the newly devised offense of scolding. In courts, women in particular were prosecuted and punished for insulting others or talking too much in a public setting. In literature, both men and women were warned about women's propensity to gossip and quarrel, while characters such as Noah's Wife and the Wife of Bath demonstrate the development of a stereotypically garrulous woman. Visual representations, such as depictions of women gossiping in church, also reinforced the message that women's speech was likely to be disruptive and deviant.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal--and yet often very public--sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing slave society. Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution.Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial difference.

Dramatic and documentary narratives about aggressive and garrulous women often cast such women as reckless and ultimately unsuccessful usurpers of cultural authority. Contending narratives, however, sometimes within the same texts, point to the effective subversion and undoing of the normative restrictions of social and gender hierarchies. Words Like Daggers explores the scolding invectives, malevolent curses, and ecstatic prophesies of early modern women as attested to in legal documents, letters, self-narratives, popular pamphlets, ballads, and dramas of the era. Examining the framing and performance of violent female speech between the 1590s and the 1660s, Kirilka Stavreva dismantles the myth of the silent and obedient women who allegedly populated early modern England. Blending gender theory with detailed historical analysis, Words Like Daggers asserts the power of women's language--the power to subvert binaries and destabilize social hierarchies, particularly those of gender--in the early modern era. In the process Stavreva reconstructs the speech acts of individual contentious women, such as the scold Janet Dalton, the witch Alice Samuel, and the Quaker Elizabeth Stirredge. Because the dramatic potential of women's powerful rhetorical performances was recognized not only by victims and witnesses of individual violent speech acts but also by theater professionals, Stavreva also focuses on how the stage, arguably the most influential cultural institution of the Renaissance, orchestrated and aestheticized women's fighting words and, in so doing, showcased and augmented their cultural significance.

Well-known scholars and poets living in sixteenth-century France, including Erasmus, Ronsard, Calvin, and Rabelais, promoted elite satire that "corrected vices" but "spared the person"—yet this period, torn apart by religious differences, also saw the rise of a much cruder, personal satire that aimed at converting readers to its ideological, religious, and, increasingly, political ideas. By focusing on popular pamphlets along with more canonical works, Less Rightly Said shows that the satirists did not simply renounce the moral ideal of elite, humanist scholarship but rather transmitted and manipulated that scholarship according to their ideological needs. Szabari identifies the emergence of a political genre that provides us with a more thorough understanding of the culture of printing and reading, of the political function of invectives, and of the general role of dissensus in early modern French society.

'The Unbridled Tongue' is a book about talking too much and why it was considered not just inadvisable but dangerous in 16th-century Europe. Drawing on a wide range of sources and approaches, it addresses Renaissance literary portrayals of gossip and rumour in a social, religious, political, and historical frame.

The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp re-evaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This 2005 study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories.