reimagining how we understand and write about the indigenous listening experience?

hungry 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. 

in his prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and drama, thomas bernhard (1931-1989)-one of the twentieth century's most uniquely gifted writers-created a new and radical style, seemingly out of thin air. his books never "tell a story" in the received sense. instead, he rages on the page, he rants and spews vitriol about the moral failures of his homeland, austria, in the long amnesiac aftermath of the second world war.

yet this furious prose, seemingly shapeless but composed with unparalleled musicality, and taxing by conventional standards, has been powerfully echoed in many writers since bernhard's death in 1989. these explorers have found in bernhard's singular accomplishment new paths for the expression of life and truth.

thomas bernhard's afterlives examines the international mobilization of bernhard's style. writers in italian, german, spanish, hungarian, english, and french have succeeded in making bernhard's austrian vision an international vision. this book tells that story.