ABSTRACT
A dirge for the old orality, itself a big idea of the 1980s, erected a barrier between the spoken and the written by asserting that they belonged to separate ontologies, exclusive methodologies, and different disciplines. A new orality would overlap with current notions of “everyday literature” that are concerned largely with digital production and would interrogate genres often judged liminal or orthogonal to literature. Applying insights from postcolonial critique, new orality research would investigate the potentials of cyberature as a bridge between literature and orature. Theories of new orality would also investigate the interstices of literature and sound, such as opera or griot performance, but also the hidden musicality that permeates the literary. In attending to both the bodies and the pages of literature, the new orality will ask the people to articulate a pedagogical challenge to colonial legacies, in which institutional attempts to conquer illiteracy are often attacks on orality and on modes of oral fluency.
