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. 

this book investigates the spaces of interaction between portuguese and brazilian modernists--specifically oswald de andrade, augusto de campos and haroldo de campos, ronald de carvalho, ant nio ferro, fernando pessoa, m rio de s -carneiro--and their interpretation of nation. most importantly, the way in which their work echoes and transfigures the ulysses myth, to be termed portuguese ulyssism by brazilian gilberto freyre in his reading of lu's vaz de cam es's epic poem the lusiads, is analyzed, underlining the presence of a postcolonial ulysses in the lusophone world. the trope of the shipwreck is central to the creative production of these atlantic modernists who, outside of their respective national literatures, interact beyond the territories of nation-states through texts on exile, national identity, and colonialism.

in addition to the renowned the lusiads, the texts studied include two issues of the luso-brazilian quarterly orpheu (1915) and ant nio ferro's contributions to brazil's klaxon (1922, in celebration of the centenary of brazil's political independence from portugal); oswald de andrade's anthropophagic manifesto (1928) and an unpublished letter to ferro; fernando pessoa's poem "ulysses" in message (1934); and haroldo de campos's galaxies (1984) and "finismundo: the last voyage" (1997). in a postcolonial ulysses in the lusophone world, relocations and transfigurations of the ulysses myth inform a dialogue between the modernists of portugal and brazil through texts on exile, national identity, and colonialism.