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.

Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound explores the ways that sonic practices (speaking, listening, recording, etc.) serve as forms of aesthetic and political dissent throughout the literary, artistic, and academic spheres in Canada. The book explores works by leading practitioners in both oral/aural and literary forms.

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change. In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the “space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.