Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound

Exploring socio-cultural and aesthetic resistance through sound.

Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound explores the ways that sonic practices (speaking, listening, recording, etc.) serve as forms of aesthetic and political dissent throughout the literary, artistic, and academic spheres in Canada. The book explores works by leading practitioners in both oral/aural and literary forms.

Print – and by extension, visuality – has historically dominated the literary, artistic, and academic spheres in Canada; however, scholars and artists have become increasingly attuned to the creative and scholarly opportunities offered by paying attention to sound.

Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound turns to a particular opportunity, interrogating the ways that sonic practices act as forms of aesthetic and political dissent. Chapters explore, on the one hand, critical methods of engaging with sound – particularly bodies of literary and artistic work in their specific materiality as read, recited, performed, mediated, archived, and remixed objects; on the other hand, they also engage with creative practices that mobilize sound as a political aesthetic, taking on questions of identity, racialization, ability, mobility, and surveillance. Divided into nine pairings that bring together works originating in oral/aural forms with works originating in writing, the book explores the creative and critical output of leading sonic practitioners. It showcases diverse approaches to the equally complex formations of sound, resistance, and community, bridging the too-often separate worlds of the practical and the academic in generative, resonant dialogue.

Combining the oral and the written, the creative and the critical, and the mediated and the live, Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound asks us to attune ourselves as listeners as well as readers.