Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experienceHungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the "whiteness of sound studies," Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism's "tin ear" that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of "doing sovereignty" in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence.Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
Show moreReimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experienceHungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the "whiteness of sound studies," Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism's "tin ear" that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of "doing sovereignty" in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence.Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
Show moreContents
Introduction
Writing Indigenous Space
1. Hungry Listening
Event Score for Guest Listening I
2.Writing about Musical Intersubjectivity
xwélalà:m, Raven Chacon’s Report
3. Contemporary Encounters Between Indigenous and Early Music
Event Score for those who hold our songs
4. Ethnographic Redress, Compositional Responsibility
Event Score for Responsibility: “qimmit katajjaq / sqwélqwel tl’ sqwmá:y”
5. Feeling Reconciliation
Event Score to Act
Acknowledgments
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Dylan Robinson is a xwelmexw (St:l) writer, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts, and associate professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He is coeditor of Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and cocurator of Soundings, an internationally touring exhibition of Indigenous art scores.
"In this brilliant and wide-ranging work, Dylan Robinson refuses to
write about anything. Instead he demonstrates what it means at the
practical, ethical, and political levels to write relationally with
other living beings, including music, sound, belongings, languages,
lands, ancestors, and readers. In method and content, Hungry
Listening is a challenge to settler colonial sensory and political
orders as well as a powerful affirmation of Indigenous thought,
practice, and art."—Beth Piatote, author of The Beadworkers and
Domestic Subjects"Hungry Listening is a necessary and creative
confrontation of the consequences of settler colonialism for
Indigenous music and sound territories. Offering a robust critique
of inclusionary performance as settler mis-audation, Dylan Robinson
forwards a transformative politics of listening, a practice of
guest listening that refuses capture and certainty. At once playful
and intensely serious, Hungry Listening experiments with affective
event scores and forms of direct address to allow readers to
imagine approaches to visiting with Indigenous sound and
performance."—Eve Tuck, University of Toronto"Dylan Robinson
employs a xwélméxw (Stó:lō) reading, listening, and thinking
practice to enact a decolonial critique of the ‘sonic encounters’
between Indigenous vocal traditions and Western classical and
popular music. Hungry Listening, by one of the field’s most
generous, perceptive, visionary, and generative scholars, will be a
game changer in the areas of Indigenous, sound, and performance
studies."—Michelle Raheja, author of Reservation Reelism:
Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native
Americans in Film
"As a form of address, Hungry Listening is profoundly conscious of
its multiple audiences, and enacts ethics of appropriate
relationship, modeling to readers how musical scholarship can
approach Indigenous creators, performers and musics in ways that
respect Indigenous sovereignty and value Indigenous creations on
their own terms."—Amodern"Robinson manages to pose compelling
arguments as to how much first needs to be unsettled whilst
establishing the new ground needed for Indigenous sound studies to
flourish."—Feminist Review "An exemplary text which forges space
for Indigenous epistemological and ontological existence through
decolonial critique in the realm of sound studies."—Canadian
Association of Music Libraries "Hungry Listening is a powerful
piece of listening through reading that not only critiques settler
listening but also candidly address the ways in which settler
colonialism has impacted Indigenous sonic spaces."—MUSICultures
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