Words awaiting another voice tells the story of Sneha, the aspiring writer’s ‘enigma of self’ when her beautiful world of dreams comes crashing down with all sorts of rejection-slips as she encounters some of the harsh realities of our consumerist, self-centered culture and society. The narrative is marked by a writerly stream of consciousness-technique, metafictional and intertextual tropes which rip apart the hypocritical and attractive façade of our society. Ironically enough, Sneha is advised to strategise her way to success. In other words, the novel aesthetically offers a criticism of our present times where, in place of ‘self-realisation’ and ‘self-recognition’ the relentless and shameless ‘self-promotion’ is offered as the goal of life in this media-mediated, lit-fest-infested world. The novel also foregrounds Sneha’s firm belief in the ‘shabda-shakti’ or the power of the word. Expressing oneself through written word can give one a tremendous and unimaginable sense of power. Throughout the narrative, the intertextual and contextual appearances of the episodes from Sneha’s first (unpublished) novel Chameleon add interesting dimensions as it finally allows Sneha’s voice to find space and freedom to reach a wider audience…

This book offers ethnographic accounts of Aymara language media activism in Bolivia during the presidency of Evo Morales (2006–2019). It draws on research conducted among Aymara language radio broadcasters, hip hop artists, and community members during a period of radical social change and Indigenous political resurgence (pachakuti) in South America's most Indigenous republic. The Plurinational Republic of Bolivia counts Aymara among its official languages, but Aymara's social status and transmission to newer generations raise concerns about whether, despite being one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages of the Americas, the threat of language obsolescence persists. This ethnographic account of Indigenous language activism shows how Aymara media and cultural workers combat this threat by making the language audible in diverse corners of Aymara life and examines the role Indigenous multilingualism plays in Bolivian politics. Through interviews and analysis of Aymara media texts, this study shows how language professionals determine how “the voice of the people” should sound. By introducing neologisms and archaicisms to avoid mixing Aymara with Spanish, Aymara language professionals disseminate a register of dehispanicized Aymara over the airwaves. The study reveals how these language professionals approach cultivating Aymara as more than a question of linguistic competence, but also of political commitment and anti-racist practice. Organized into two sections, one on radio and one on song, and including clear explanations and illustrations of key concepts in linguistic anthropology, this book listens to Aymara language advocacy from devout Catholics, union militants, and hip hop artists and fans, who hear in their language both the past and the future of Bolivia's Aymaras.

Examines the origins and growth of a group of poems that make up one of the great poetic achievements of this century: Eliot's Four Quartets.