ABSTRACT
Ventriloquism is one of the most pervasive metaphors by which issues of identity, ownership and power have been articulated within a culture of performance. It could be said that all performance is broadly ventriloquial, in a double movement whereby the performer gives his or her voice to another, and, in the process, takes the voice of that other into him-or herself. Cultural theorists interested in the ways in which identity can be both sustained and violated in different kinds of verbal performance – in playing the part of another, in borrowing and mixing idioms and intonations – have developed what I have elsewhere called the ‘proprietary thematics’ of the voice.1 Psychoanalytic theory, especially of a Lacanian variety, has assisted mightily with this formulation of problems of ownership and identity with respect to language, asking, when I speak, do I, really? With whose words? Whose voice? Ventriloquism has become the master trope for articulating the contemporary concern with the ethics of the voice.
