Sound studies. Indigenous sound studies, to be precise, by Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson. The centre of the work is consideration, through very close and careful attention to a range of works and performances, of the various ways in which settler art music and Indigenous music get put in relation and taken up. That might seem …
The last scholarly book I read left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth – despite encountering a handful of interesting ideas, overall it didn’t feel like a terribly good use of my time. Thankfully, this book has cleansed my metaphorical reading palate and proved to be both a fascinating read in its …
A book concerned with “positioning sound and its discourses in dialogue with contemporary struggles,” that attempts to seek out “ethical and agentive positions or tactics” grounded in “experiences we have of listening and being heard” (1). It does this by drawing on the scholarly area of sound studies and a range of other theoretical resources, …
A scholarly history of the social and cultural origins of sound reproduction. Very much not an effort to tell a straightforward, linear story about the history of telegraphy, telephony, broadcasting, and recording, but rather draws selectively and nonlinearly from the decades before such tech was introduced and the early decades after to push readers to …
By Toronto-based writer and performer Kai Cheng Thom. Essays interspersed with poems. Smart. Thoughtful. Challenging. Names not just the violence of the mainstream but its more insidious correlates within communities that style themselves as being of marginalized belonging and/or of resistance. Less ornate in its writing than I for some reason (perhaps because the author …
A scholarly examination of “told-to” narratives in the Canadian context, with some longer-ago history but mostly between the 1970s and 1990s. The told-to narrative is an old form that is of particular relevance to colonial contexts, in which white settler scholars and writers have produced written texts from oral stories told to them by Indigienous …
An odd little book. My reason for reading it was not terribly well aligned with its own purpose, so my relative indifference to it should not be taken too seriously. The author is an experimental composer, seemingly fairly well known in her particular niche, who has spent a lifetime thinking about listening. I heard about …
Storytelling about a life spent at the heart of many of the major social movements in the US in the last 35 years combined with very practical lessons about how to organize. I had never heard of Lisa Fithian before, but as an organizer, a facilitator, a trainer, and an activist, she has done a …
The much-anticipated first book by journalist and activist Desmond Cole. He uses his experience of 2017 as a frame to talk about Black life and Black struggles in Canada. If you are someone who is glued to grassroots activist social media in the Canadian context, many of the incidents and struggles that Cole speaks about …
Memoir. By a prominent French public intellectual of the left (whom I had not heard of until a friend recommended this book to me). He first made a name for himself with an important biography of Michel Foucault, cemented his reputation by producing some of the foundational scholarly work in gay studies in the French …