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© 2020. This work is published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The memorial's sculptures include the Listening Cone, an 18-foot long bronze form shaped like a megaphone installed at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and Sound Ring, an empty oval frame containing a hidden array of eight speakers that play field and ambient nature recordings located at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The few critical analyses of WIM published in academic venues focus heavily if not exclusively on the website, privilege verbal and visual registers, and emphasize representations of, and by, humans.2 I offer here a different approach to WIM-one that critiques the full memorial, including the site-based sculptures and an updated website, and that specifically tunes in to sound.3 'While critic Lauren Kołodziejski faults WIM for its "notable absence of human agents" (441), I argue that this absence is in fact central to the memorial's rhetorical force: by muting human voices and amplifying sounds of non-human species and landscapes, WIM decenters human subjects and works to temper the human exceptionalism that underlies so much of 'Western thought and fuels our extractive, destructive approach to the natural world. "Can you hear me?": Seeking Resonance in the Anthropocene We humans6 are currently presiding over our planet's sixth mass extinction: an immense, accelerating die-off of myriad species.7 Just as we have come to learn- in the past 300 years or so, a mere blip in geological time-'about the five major catastrophic extinction events that predate human presence on the earth, we are coming to the harrowing realization that our species, homo sapiens, is causing the sixth (Kolbert 2014). The IPCC's October 2018 "Doomsday report" warned that humans have a slender dozen years to take meaningful action to draw down carbon emissions and hopefully contain the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.10 One United Nations official described the IPCC report as "a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen" (New York Times Editorial Board).

Details

Title
Performing Loss: Sonic Rhetoric in Maya Lin's What Is Missing?
Author
DeLaure, Marilyn 1 

 (Ph.D. University of Iowa) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of San Francisco 
Pages
1-32
Publication year
2020
Publication date
2020
Publisher
Liminalities
e-ISSN
15572935
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2383522918
Copyright
© 2020. This work is published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.