Disciplinary Listening Regimes: 
Politics of Language, Race, and Citizenship in Territorial Hawai`i

Date and Time: 2023. 10. 19. Thu 17:00-18:30
Place: Asia Center Bldg. 101 Room 406 
Inquiry: anthrobk21plus@snu.ac.kr
Lecturer: Professor Christine R. Yano (University of Hawai`i)
 
Abstract: From 1924 to 1960, the U.S. territory and later state of Hawai`i instituted a unique practice of segregation in its public schools, called the English Standard School System.  By this system, children would be tested for their English language facility:  those that passed the verbal test would be placed in select classes or schools; those that did not would be placed in regular educational settings.  Initially proposed to the territorial government by haole (white) mothers who were concerned that their children enrolled in public schools not mingle unduly with non-haole, the system used language and its policing as a means of race-based segregation.
This paper takes this case study from language as an example of what I call “disciplinary listening regimes” ? that is, states of order built around restrictive practices of aurality.  Such states of order advance a confluence of morality and aesthetics such that “being good” and “sounding good” (here, “speaking good,” “speaking American”) overlap.  More importantly, disciplinary listening regimes hierarchize sounds, particularly targeting what might be called “vulgar sounds,” identified as Hawaiian Creole-based “accents,” “mispronunciations,” “ungrammatical constructions.”  The pervasiveness and force of these disciplinary listening regimes find their efficacy through what I am dubbing a “panauricon” state?that is, an all-hearing, ever-present condition of critical, even punitive, listening.  The force of such a panauricon state lies not only in a specific listening body in the form of parents, teachers, and school boards, but in its critical and forceful measure as internalized by individuals.  Through archival documents and interviews with former students, I examine ways by which listening for language use acted as a powerful social, political, and ultimately disciplinary gauge of achievement in Territorial Hawai`i.