Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies

Abstract

S P R I N G & F A L L 2 0 2 0 W I C A Z O S A R E V I E W Hungry Listening is a disciplinary reckoning. The book argues that settlers listen to Indigenous music and sounds through settler colonial musical logics. This book has two primary audiences: Indigenous and nonIndigenous. Some of the moments directed to Indigenous readers are open to nonIndigenous readers like myself to witness and learn. Others contain unexplained knowledge or exist in spaces where I am not invited. Robinson also directly asks nonIndigenous readers to name and reject settler logics of listening, composing, performing, and writing. Robinson hopes for transformative intersectional work between Indigenous and nonIndigenous scholars. He models this intersectional work in Hungry Listening by drawing on multiple disciplines and speaking to multiple positionalities. The book title is a concept developed by Robinson, which he explains in the introduction. It is an English translation of two Halq’eméylem words: (1) shxwelítemelh (“the adjective for settler or white person’s methods/things” [p. 2]), which is based on the word Stó:l ̄ o people (xwélmexw) used for starving White settlers in the midnineteenthcentury gold rush; and (2) xwélalà:m (listening). Robinson also provides an overview of his critique of “inclusionary music” and “inclusionary performance” as musical contexts in which Indigenous content is mined for aesthetic interest and “fit”— or assimilated— into Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson University of Minnesota Press, 2020