Acoustic Entanglements: Sound and Aesthetic Practice

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.