Acoustic Entanglements: Sound and Aesthetic Practice

Description

Combining a cultural history of sound with media and literary studies, ‘Acoustic Entanglements'presents a new perspective on the entangled affiliations of transnational mobility, diasporic cultural memory, embodied performance, and the material practices of aesthetic acts. Starting by reassessing Emily Dickinson's poetry as participating in an emergent phonographic logic, this book proposes that sound in modernity assumes the capacity to cross time and space, ‘entangling'past and present, living and dead, periphery and alleged center. From this vantage point, the study examines Lillian Allen's dub poetry as an ethical demand for economic justice made via sound, Janet Cardiff's audio walks as renegotiating the cultural place of Europe for a North American imaginary, and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore's performances as voicing indigenous resilience in the present. Focusing on Canada and the US, the book brings together the fields of sound studies and transnational American studies. Cover Titel Imprint Table of Contents Table of Figures Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Sound that Moves 2 Spirited Media, Aural Excesses: Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph 2.1 Remembering and Recording in the Nineteenth Century 2.1.1 Dickinson’s Phonographic Logic 2.1.2 Composition as Intermedial Gesture 2.1.3 Dickinson’s Aural Excess 2.1.4 Bolts of Melody: Dickinson’s Poetry 2.2 Speaking Machines, Media Archives 2.3 Spiritualism and Techniques of Hearing 2.3.1 Transnationalism: Voices at a Distance 2.3.2 Dictation: Discourses of Hearing in the Nineteenth Century 2.4 Poetic Transfers 2.5 Detached Voices 3 (Re)Mixing Histories: Lillian Allen and the Routes of Dub Poetry 3.1 Performing Memory 3.2 Transnational Politics 3.3 The Changing Same: Remix Poetics in the Diaspora 3.4 Canadian Routes and Roots in the Caribbean 3.5 Transgressive Sounds 4 Subjects of Hearing, Subject to History: The Sound Works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller 4.1 Disciplining Hearing 4.2 Hearing Divided among the Senses 4.3 Sound and Spatiality: The Audio Walks of Cardiff and Miller 4.3.1 Imagining History without Us: "Walk Münster" (1997 4.3.2 Canada and the Audio Walks 4.3.3 Canadian Subjects and the Spectacle of Modernity 4.3.4 From Oakville to Louisiana: Beyond Site-Specificity 4.4 "Murder of Crows" (2008) and the Politics of Affect 4.5 Practices of Looking in "Eyes of Laura" (2005 4.6 Calling to Attention 5 Stratified Sound: Rebecca Belmore and William Forsythe 5.1 Transnational Trajectories 5.2 "Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan": The Sound of Protest 5.3 Articulating Indigenous Modernity 5.4 Writing Histories, Reading Systems in William Forsythe 6 Conclusion: Confinement and Liberation Bibliography Index Backcover