Print – and by extension, visuality – has historically dominated the literary, artistic, and academic spheres in Canada; however, scholars and artists have become increasingly attuned to the creative and scholarly opportunities offered by paying attention to sound.

Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound turns to a particular opportunity, interrogating the ways that sonic practices act as forms of aesthetic and political dissent. Chapters explore, on the one hand, critical methods of engaging with sound – particularly bodies of literary and artistic work in their specific materiality as read, recited, performed, mediated, archived, and remixed objects; on the other hand, they also engage with creative practices that mobilize sound as a political aesthetic, taking on questions of identity, racialization, ability, mobility, and surveillance. Divided into nine pairings that bring together works originating in oral/aural forms with works originating in writing, the book explores the creative and critical output of leading sonic practitioners. It showcases diverse approaches to the equally complex formations of sound, resistance, and community, bridging the too-often separate worlds of the practical and the academic in generative, resonant dialogue.

Combining the oral and the written, the creative and the critical, and the mediated and the live, Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound asks us to attune ourselves as listeners as well as readers.

Deanna Fong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English and History at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of auditory media, ethics, and listening. She is a member of the federally funded SpokenWeb team, who have developed a web-based archive of digitized sound recordings for literary study. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the audio/multimedia archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah, and has done substantial cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Japanese Canadian poet and painter Roy Kiyooka. She is the author of chapters in the forthcoming books Canlit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queens UP, 2020) and Pictura: Essays on the Life and Work of Roy Kiyooka (Guernica Editions, 2020).

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Cole Mash is a poet, scholar, and community arts organizer from Syilx/Okanagan territory in Kelowna, BC.

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