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 this book, jaime rodr guez matos proposes the "formless" as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. thinking through both literary and political writings around the cuban revolution, rodr guez matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures and various political experiments that have sought to give form to a principle of sovereignty based on the category of representation. in doing so, he proposes the formless as the limit of modern and contemporary reflections on the meaning of politics while exploring the philosophical consequences of a formless concept of temporality for the critique of metaphysics.

rodr guez matos takes the writing and thought of jos lezama lima as the guiding thread in exploring the possibility of a politicity in which time is imagined beyond the disciplining functions it has had throughout the metaphysical tradition--a time of the absence of time, in which the absence of time no longer means eternity.