Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies By Dylan Robinson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Dylan Robinson's recent book offers deeply insightful scholarship seeking to redress academic and musical interventions into Indigenous sound. The title, Hungry Listening, is Robinson's term for the way that settlers, as opposed to Indigenous peoples, consume Indigenous sound. The title is the translation of the Halq'eméylem words for “settler or white person's methods/things” (shxwelítemelh) and “listening” (xwélalà:m) (2). However, the actual connotation of shxwelítemelh would more precisely translate to “starving person” (2). Robinson pairs those words together (admitting this is a purposefully uncomfortable syntax in the Halq'eméylem language) to arrive at his title and his theory of settler colonial listening. Dylan also employs the concept of “hungry listening” because it is antithetical to Indigenous epistemology. When listening “hungrily,” one tries to capture and understand music based on an ability to perceive, recognize, and classify sound. Robinson describes this mode as the settler's “listening positionality” and employs the term to describe the “perceptual habits, ability, and bias” that guide listening (37). He further argues that academia engages in hungry listening when it encourages researchers to identify and master Indigenous sounds. This mindset leads scholars and audiences to think and write about Indigenous sound as a concept rather than using Indigenous frameworks to theorize the music, which prioritizes content over the structure. Robinson identifies this positionality in order to deconstruct it and explore decolonial listening practices for both settlers and Indigenous peoples. Each chapter engages with musical, scholarly, and public examples of various settler and Indigenous listening habits in past and present situations.

In Chapter 1, Robinson expands his definition of settler listening as it is concerned with “narratocracy.” He argues that settler listening valorizes music on the basis of what can be understood about its narrative qualities, which is fueled by a desire to capture the music's content over its affective qualities. He suggests that listeners or people who write about Indigenous music should engage in “guest listening,” accepting the fact that they will not fully understand these different sound territories. Riffing on Susan McClary's destabilization of musical understanding, he writes, “decolonizing musical practice involves becoming no longer sure what LISTENING [sic] is” (47).¹ This type of decolonial listening practice would be “non-totalizing” and reject the impulse to approximate an Indigenous listening framework. Robinson argues that refusing to feed the desire to master Indigenous content through knowledge reduces the amount of tension between settler and Indigenous epistemes.

This concept of “unknowing” is a strength of Robinson's work, as is his method of “starving” the impetuses for hungry listening by refusing to offer a comfortable model for engaging with Indigenous music. His book instead models how to question and be unsettled by what a listener might not know. Robinson explores this unknowing through performative writing practices in Chapter 2, multicultural music making in Chapters 3 and 5, and ethnographic archival recordings and transcriptions in Chapter 4. Accordingly, in Chapter 2, Robinson critiques the professional, academic writing guides that curtail personal expressive writing aesthetics and “challenge the dichotomy between music's limited agency as passive ‘object,’ and the listener as the active partner” (79). In this way, he challenges writing about Indigenous concepts in music, and instead proposes to write within them. This prepositional change encourages the listener or scholar to share their musical experiences by sharing space alongside an Indigenous subjectivity rather than using language to describe or master it. As Robinson notes, exploring different subjectivities in music is not new: He even recalls how a reviewer for this very monograph critiqued Chapter 2 for being reminiscent of a graduate school introduction to the concept of musical subjectivity. However, as he notes, listening theories concerning multiple positionalities remain necessary in a time when marginalized identities in academia have to “justify their very presence” (103). Robinson's goal to redress Indigenous sound studies thus involves applying feasible practices for musicmaking, writing, and scholarship to existing academic ideologies that desire to acknowledge and serve diverse subjectivities but that are hindered by disciplinary structures. Chapters 3–5 accomplish this by interrogating colonizing ethnographic practices and inclusionary music performances, as well as public performances between Indigenous artists and Western classical composers and ensembles.

In exploring past ethnographies of Indigenous music, Robinson advocates for ethnographic responsibility and for an ethics of Indigenous archiving that aligns with Indigenous perspectives. He thus argues that individual cultures should direct the archiving of transcribed materials to avoid preservation issues, including the potential harm of chemical and material preservation and the possibility of scholarly and compositional misuse. Chapter 3 includes Robinson's examination of the terminology used to describe Indigenous music and musicians interacting with non-Indigenous traditions. Rather than using the term “multiculturalism,” which carries political baggage from its historical usage for cultural dispossession and violence in North America, Robinson opts for terms like “inclusionary” or “Indigenous +.” This language flattens the political optimism that comes with the idealization of a post-racial, multicultural society. Chapter 5 extends these ideas by examining inclusionary performances aimed at reconciliation, problematizing the sentimentality of musical reconciliation as a positive, transformative experience.

Robinson's work is most effective when he demonstrates how intersubjective and performative writing can offer a valuable method for exploring music from within an Indigenous position. For example, he poignantly notes the dissonance between his own perceptions and observations of settlers’ experiences of the politically motivated, inclusionary musical performance created to commemorate the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Unlike the joyful and optimistic tears shed by settler audience members who were moved by the promise of cultural reconciliation, Robinson shares that his tears were shed in anger and sadness as he watched what he described as a “story of salvage paradigm [that] sat in tension with other less palatable moments of mystery of which the general public remains ignorant” (223). He thus interprets this musical event as a transformative moment of resentment rather than reconciliation, demonstrating that writing from within music's subjectivity and one's own positionality are crucial to understanding diverse perspectives.

The vulnerability in Robinson's work exemplifies the type of scholarship that he advocates—that is, a refusal to bend to academic writing norms and instead to speak frankly about the harm and dispossession inherent in academia and in some Indigenous-focused musical practices. He juxtaposes his experience with settler sensibilities, acknowledging that it is “much easier to believe in the transformative power [of Indigenous inclusionary practices] … rather than to unsettle and engage with the enormous amount of work that must still be done,” but that “it is imperative that we acknowledge the crudeness of empathy and affect alone” (232). Robinson encourages all listeners, artists, composers, and scholars to push beyond what is easy and knowable, and learn to expect to be unsettled. Additionally, by incorporating interviews with artists, performers, and composers, he models how music scholars can include multiple perspectives to write within, not just about, Indigenous music and sound.

Robinson's book thoughtfully engages with past and contemporary sound studies, ethno/musicological scholarship, and interdisciplinary Indigenous scholarship in literature, history, and law. His expansive bibliography makes his writing rich, detailed, and interconnected, but more importantly, draws attention to the dearth of scholarship attempting to create a framework for establishing an ethics of Indigenous sound studies. He thus grounds his work in previous studies of Indigenous refusal from outside of music scholarship, such as that of Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, and Leanne Simpson.² He also cites feminist, queer, and ethnic theories from music and sound studies more broadly, including those of Ellie Hisama, Ashon Crawley, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, and Roshanak Khesti.³ Robinson is unable, however, to situate his work within an established sound studies discourse particularly related to Indigeneity. He attributes this problem to the larger issue of whiteness in the formation of sound studies, which has excluded preexisting and foundational examinations of race and sound and now risks marginalizing the voices of, and topics concerning, people of color.⁴ Robinson, along with other North American scholars like Jessica Bissett Perea, are thus pushing the field toward realizing Indigenous futures in music and sound studies through innovative and compassionate theories of listening to and writing about music.⁵

Hungry Listening is thus a foundational contribution to music and sound studies. Robinson not only advocates for and demonstrates an ethics of Indigenous sound studies; he also asks us to contend with Western epistemologies and academia in ways that appropriately challenge any scholar's understanding of the subjectivities and positionalities of their research subjects, whether in contemporary musics, historical topics, or ethnographic research. His timely insights are important for graduate students who are newly developing their own research methods as well as undergraduates who want to better understand discourses of race in music studies. In addition, Indigenous studies scholars outside of music who wish to analyze sound, and music scholars new to Indigenous studies, will benefit greatly from Robinson's thoughtful examination of, and practical recommendations for improving, the state of Indigeneity and music studies.

As a final note on the intended audience, Robinson notes that Hungry Listening addresses both Indigenous readers and non-Indigenous or settler readers. However, he specifically asks the non-Indigenous or settler reader to “affirm Indigenous sovereignty” by agreeing not to read a part of the introduction that is meant as a welcome and a gathering for “Indigenous voices and bodies” (25). I encourage all those who choose to read Hungry Listening to heed Robinson's request.