Radical Open Access Collective
Building Horizontal Alliances
In both sound studies and the sonic arts, the concept of “resonance” has increasingly played a central role in attuning listeners to the politics of sound. The term itself is borrowed from acoustics, where resonance simply refers to the transfer of energy between two neighboring objects. For example, plucking a note on one guitar string will cause the other strings to vibrate at a similar frequency. When someone or something makes a sound, everything in the immediate environs—objects, people, the room itself—will respond with sympathetic vibrations. Simply put, in acoustics, resonance describes a sonic connection between sounding objects and their environment. In the arts, the concept of resonance emphasizes the situated existence of sound as a transformative encounter between bodies in a particular time and place. Resonance has become a key term to think through how sound creates a listening community, a transitory assemblage whose reverberations may be felt beyond a single moment of encounter.
For its recent performance series, simply called Resonance, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago drew on this generative concept by bringing together four artists who explore sound as an “introspective force for greater understanding, compassion, and change.” Curated by Tara Aisha Willis and Laura Paige Kyber, the series builds on theories of resonance as an affective relationship between sounding bodies developed by writers and artists like Sonia Louis Davis, Karen Christopher, and Birgit Abels. Crucially, the curators cite composer Juliana Hodkinson’s definition of resonance as an action occurring “when the space between subject and object starts to be reduced, without them fusing into one.” Sound has the capacity for creating a moment of connection, but resonance doesn’t efface difference. As Willis notes in the series program, the artists in the series largely identify as women of color, occupying a position “where distinction and difference are most ingrained in lived experience, and where practice of creating resonance across them are most honed.”
Although the artists in the series, Anita Martine Whitehead, Samita Sinha, Laura Ortman, and 7NMS, are at least partially working within musical traditions, the curators’ framing of the series in terms of sound rather than music speaks to a broader aural turn that has animated both sonic art and scholarship. The essential conceptual move underlying the growth of sound art in the museum and sound studies in the academy is the identification of sound as a medium of expression not fully contained by the history of music. Abstracting from the realm of music to the broader terrain of sound allows these artists to reconsider the materiality of sound and practices of listening—in short, to explore the resonant relations between bodies coexisting in time and space. Yet these pieces do not search for an ahistorical sonic ontology, but instead use sound as a situated tool to forge new social realities in the present. As the artist Samita Sinha puts it, her piece “offers technologies of listening and being together.” Thinking of listening in terms of resonance, we can hear these works as technologies of communal listening.
The series kicked off with the world premiere of Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts. I attended the evening of March 28, the first of three scheduled performances. Each performance in the series began at 7:30pm at the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater. The experimental musical work is an oneiric meditation on the US carceral state centered on the experience of trio of Black femmes passing time in a prison waiting room, ruminating on their dreams, living with state violence, and the unceasing passage of time. Choreographed and co-written by Whitehead, this particular performance of FORCE began with the audience congregated outside the museum’s Edlis Neeson Theater in the transitional space of the lobby, appropriately waiting for the show to start. The opera’s first act took in this space, as a group of performers entered and sat on the grand spiral stairs of the MCA, patiently biding their time. After a few minutes, a mass of four dancers joined them, slowly making their way down the long lobby corridor towards the group on the stairs; their bodies rhythmically moved as one, limbs interlinked and breathing heavy as if burdened by an invisible weight.
The choreography of FORCE continued this motif, as weary bodies became enmeshed, leaning and relying on each other for support. When this phalanx reached the stairwell and laboriously climbed as a unit, the first song began and their voices resonated through the halls of the museum. From there, the audience members were led to the stage not through the theater’s main doors, but through the innards of the museum. Laying the institution bare, the performers led us downstairs through hallways of lockers, then backstage, before we finally took our seats on stage.
The majority of FORCE is then performed on a bare theater stage, the audience in rows encircling the singers and dancers accompanied by a small ensemble of bass, drums, and keys. Just as the audience surrounds the stage, an array of speakers arranged along the edges of the room faces inward to create a shared soundscape inhabited by both the spectators and performers. As an opera, FORCE presents less a linear narrative than a series of songs swirling with reoccurring motifs that, through their repetition, suggest the temporality of waiting. One of the most powerful of these lyrical motifs introduced early in the show is that of fungal growth, of lichens felt on the body, in the nose, and on the eyes. This bivalent image of fungus both points towards an omnipresent carceral power felt on the body, while also recognizing the strategic possibilities of rhizomatic forms. The major theme of the work is of course waiting and time itself, with the singers repeatedly asking how long they have been here—the waiting room, the prison system, the police state—and how much longer they may have yet to go.
While addressing these weighty themes, the work still makes space for the possibility of joy and alternative futures. The performance ends with the singers repeating lines about freedom in a song that never concludes. As we exited, again through the bowels of the MCA, the song reverberated from the theater into the lobby. If FORCE’s first act took place before the audience entered the space of the theater, then the third act likewise continued beyond these four walls as our temporary listening community dispersed into the streets of Chicago. Even after the show, the song did not end.
The second work in the series, Samita Sinha’s Tremor built on these themes of power, space, and sonic connections between resonating bodies. I attended the first of three performances at the MCA on the evening of April 18. Performed on a minimal stage set designed by architect Sunil Bald consisting of three dramatic red sashes suspended from the ceiling, Tremor is an hour-long piece centered on Sinha’s “unraveling” of Indian vocal traditions. Of the artists in this performance series, Sinha perhaps most explicitly explored the theme of resonance, describing her work as “the practice of attuning oneself to the raw material of vibration and its emergence in space, as well as unfolding the possibilities that arise from encounters between this sonic material and other individuals.” In Tremor, the artist is accompanied by the dancer Darrell Jones, vocalist Sunder Ganglani, and an electronic soundscape created live by Ash Fure. As in FORCE, the audience was seated on the stage around the performers, with the shared sonic environment emphasizing the coexistence of our bodies in space.
In broad strokes, Tremor demonstrates the power of sonic community in the face of entropy, presenting a pair of singers competing with a barrage of electronic sound, finding solace in each other’s voice, and ultimately emerging together after an overwhelming onslaught of noise. Accompanied by a low rumble of barely audible sound, the piece begans with the four performers entering the stage and walking in an ever-widening circle, a starting point of social dispersal. Sinha, Ganglani, and Fuhre then took their places at opposing corners of the stage, on cushions placed under the suspended sashes. Jones moved around the center of the stage in ways alternately suggesting ecstasy and pain. The vocalists tentatively began singing wordless vocalizations that tended to resolve to a single note, sometimes accompanied by Sinha’s droning ektara.
As the performance continued, the lights dim and Fure’s electronic sound become increasingly loud and abrasive, a heavily delayed electronic whirring alternately suggesting buzzsaws or heavy machinery. When this noise reached a sustained roaring climax, the dancer and singers moved to the center of the stage, forming a circle with their bodies. Finally, the electronic sound subsides, and the vocalists, led by Sinha, begin singing again—this time with a more supple melody, no longer abrasive vocalizations centered on a single note. This circle of bodies—the performers and we, the audience—have outlasted the assault of noise, co-existing in space, transformed and fortified by this resonant encounter.`
White Mountain Apache sound artist and musician Laura Ortman’s performance marked the release of her latest album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur and it provocatively reframes the spatiality of resonance in temporal terms. Ortman performed twice at the MCA, and I attended the first night on April 26. White Mountain Apache sound artist and musician Laura Ortman’s performance marked the release of her latest album, Smoke Rings Shimmers Endless Blur and it provocatively reframes the spatiality of resonance in temporal terms. Where the idea of resonance largely has spatial connotations of synchronic coexistence, Ortman challenges us to think of resonance in terms of time and history through her use of looping sound. Curator Laura Paige Kyber points to this aspect of the artist’s practice, drawing on the work of writers Joseph M. Pierce and Mark Rifkin to argue against the linear time of settler history in favor of “many distinct and self-determined notions of time.” As Kyber suggests, while past histories may resonate through her work, Ortman’s vital sound-making confronts us forcefully in the present.
For her hour-long set, Ortman employed a minimal—but powerful—toolkit for her practice of “sculpting sound”: a single electrified violin run through a pedal board, occasionally supplemented by her voice, a whistle, and a small bell. Throughout the show, the violin was heavily augmented by distortion, delay, and a looping pedal run through a Fender amplifier. Ortman used the loop to build repeating layers of shoegaze-like fuzz over which she improvised on her violin, her bowing veering ecstatically between melodic phrases and rhythmic noise. For most of the performance, she was alone in front of the bare black wall of the Edlis Neeson Theater, with heavy fog machine haze dramatically lit by spotlights and two lines of fluorescent lights on the floor receding into a vanishing point at the back of the stage. She was also accompanied by two short films for the first half: footage of dramatic New Mexico landscapes shot in collaboration with Daniel Hyde and Echota Killsnight, and a video directed by Razelle Benally of Ortman performing in Prospect Park near her home in Brooklyn.
Like Ortman’s music, Benally’s film plays with time, freely shifting between slow motion and double time footage of her performance. Likewise, Ortman’s use of the loop inherently emphasized temporality; with each decaying loop, the past continues to noisily repeat in the present—yet remains with us even as it becomes harder to discern. But amidst the resonance of the past, we are confronted with the artist meeting us in the here and now. We continue to hear the past resonating with is its own distinct temporality and it becomes the basis for Ortman’s vital artistic practice in the present. At the end of her performance, the loops fade away and we are ultimately faced with the artist standing before us sculpting sound with the violin.
The final work in the series, Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist by 7NMS, a collaboration between Marjani Forté-Saunders and Everett Saunders, centered on the figure of the Emcee and the tradition of hip-hop as powerful forces in the Black radical imagination. I attended the May 9 performance. Charting the creative journey of an aspiring lyricist, the piece mixes choreography by Forté-Saunders, an extended spoken-word monologue by Saunders, and a collage of music and sound partially drawn from the Sun Ra Collection at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. Putting the communal ideals of resonance into practice, the artists developed this work in collaboration with the Chicago artistic community, finding inspiration from visits to the city’s South Side Community Arts Center, Stony Island Arts Bank, and Miyagi Records.
The performance begins with a choreographed prelude with Forté-Saunders and dancer Marcella Lewis moving together on a bare stage. Upon Saunders’s entrance onto the stage as the titular lyricist, Forté-Saunders and Lewis largely recede, becoming silent specters, moving through, and occasionally entering the ensuing narrative. In the first section, the lyricist recounted his youth training to be an emcee, adopting an increasingly martial cadence as he described his hard work developing breath control, free-styling, and rhyme-writing skills. This artistic intensity is followed by the most powerful part of the show: a long audio montage of interviews with other lyricists, their voices emanating from speakers surrounding Saunders. As their words ping-ponged from speaker to speaker, the narrator began flinging his body across the stage, before finally collapsing in a roar of white noise and projected static. From there, the lyricist described his further spiritual and political education under the tutelage of “three kings,” wise men he met on the streets of Philadelphia. In the show’s final moments, we watched the emcee frantically writing his lyrics on the stage floor, his words projected, resonating through the auditorium.
The diversity of performances in the series speaks to the capacious power of the concept of resonance, and the continued vitality of sound as a medium of expression. Through the series, sound was employed as a situated tool of connection, convening audience and performer in a communal space without eliding difference.
In her piece, Samita Sinha draws on the thinking of Caribbean philosopher’s Éduoard Glissant’s notion of trembling. Trembling thinking “is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought … We need trembling thinking – because the world trembles, and our sensibility, our affect trembles … even when I am fighting for my identity, I consider my identity not as the only possible identity in the world.” Airek Beauchamp suggests a similar connection between sound and trembling, writing about the potential for sonic connection between marginalized queer bodies. Beauchamp argues that strategically deployed noise “communicates in trembles, resonating in both the psyche and the actual body,” coalescing disparate identities into a powerful social form. Trembling then, like resonance, doesn’t offer a single solution to global crises—likewise these artists do not treat sound as an inherently revelatory tool of political liberation. But through resonance, understood as a technology of communal listening, the artists invite us to hope for transformative encounters, for new ways of hearing the world.
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Featured Image: Photo: Rachel Keane on https://mcachicago.org/
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Harry Burson holds a PhD in Film & Media from the University of California, Berkeley. He researches and teaches on the theory and history of sonic media, exploring the intersection of digital and aural cultures, with particular focus on immersive media, sound art, and VR. His work examines how sound technologies have shaped both our understanding of and embodied relationship to digital media. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago (hburson@uic.edu)
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This article also benefitted from the editorial review of Dahlia Bekong. Thank you!
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig this:
SO! Amplifies: Wu Tsang’s Anthem (2021)—Freddie Cruz Nowell
Freedom Back: Sounding Black Feminist History, Courtesy the Artists–Tavia Nyong’o
My Time in the Bush of Drones: or, 24 Hours at Basilica Hudson–Robert Ryan
The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020)—Casey Mecija
i begin with an acknowledgement of the myriad of organizers, scholars, artists, and teachers that have shaped and continue to shape the way that i think and write. Édouard Glissant, Christina Sharpe, Lucille Clifton, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Dionne Brand, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde. it is through their profound reflections on questions of Blackness, place, belonging, earth, and love, that i have found meaning in and context for what follows.
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in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism. in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.
these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis.
Allie Martin describes “decolonial soundwalk praxis” as a way of listening that disrupts and disturbs dominant western understandings of sound and space, in “Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method” (2019). to me, it also involves cultivating an embodied practice of centering that life which dominant pedagogies deem less than, exploitable, and extractable. in the specific geographies of the bay area, it has meant that my primary orientation while soundwalking has been to listen for the creek that runs through the land—even when the water runs dry, even when all we can see is an intersection.
the creeks i followed were mostly routed underground, culverted to run under parking lots, freeways, shopping malls, grocery stores, and other urban sites of development. the prioritizing of urban development/renewal/gentrification in the bay area over tending to the ecologies of its creeks points to the place that the land is seen to hold in so-called modern society: as a resource available to exploit as desired, as is convenient for the logistics of capitalist expansion and development. to listen in such a way, for the creek and for other forms of life forced underground and to the margins, requires methods perhaps alternative to the traditional soundwalk. we must renegotiate the categories of sound that are implied in western colonial pedagogies. we must reevaluate what constitutes a “creek sound” or a “nature sound” in the first place.
to listen for the creek when it is covered by concrete necessitates that we reach beyond thinking of a creek as something which exists in and of itself, in isolation.
∼∼∼might the sound of a creek be more than just trickling water falling through rocks? can it not be heard still in the place where it meets the ocean?∼∼∼
∼∼∼or in the rustling of the trees who drink from the same groundwater?∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼couldn’t a creek be heard in a voice that speaks of it, as in a prayer, or a promise, or a song?∼∼∼
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if we understand space as relational, as Nigel Thrift offers in “Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography” (96), then perhaps we can reach an imagining of a creek as finding its life everywhere where water is sacred, running freely through the bodies of those that know it is there.
acknowledging the body as the point of contact between the self and the environment is an important part of a decolonial soundwalk praxis. “place is involved with embodiment” Thrift says (103), and in fact, when we truly acknowledge the body, the very boundary between the body and the environment begins to dissipate, because the body itself is constantly a part of place-making processes. if sound is a dimension through which we can understand place, then, similarly, listening for the life insisting in a place is not separate from listening for the people who are in relationship with it.
in my soundwalks, i leaned into the fact that i was experiencing every place principally through my body, and as i became more comfortable recording, i gave myself more permission to allow my experience to be subjective. what i realized is that my subjectivity, my specific presence to my body’s relationship with the places i was in, was an important orientation to be able to embody a decolonial soundwalk praxis – to be able to hear the sounds that otherwise may have been neglected.
∼∼∼while walking along lobos creek trail, for example, i noticed, growing out of the sand, plants that were familiar to me, that i had relationships with. the house finches were chirping, and my footsteps were clear∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼but the plants i recognized were not – could not be – audible to me until i spoke their names and touched their seed pods.∼∼∼
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∼∼∼i pulled a few pods off a branch and holding them near the microphone i cracked them open, letting the seeds fall into my hands. i listened to the pods split down the middle and drop the seeds, and in their snapping i heard how much tension they were holding.∼∼∼
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i felt how much strain it must be to make and carry all those seeds, how much release it must be to crack open and spill out of yourself, and i was grateful to bear witness. i held the seeds in my hand and some time later, i gave them to the creek. in allowing myself the trust to follow my body’s intuitive relationship with the given place, i found sounds that i otherwise would not have heard. ultimately, i found a depth of connection to and intimacy with a place that before listening to in this way, i was a stranger to.
the work of giving attention to the sounds that go unheard is necessarily an embodied exercise. it demands relationship and it demands entanglement. it demands crawling inside a mossy culvert to hear the creek talk.
curious to hear how the creek sounded differently in the tunnel, i went off the trail at piedmont park to climb inside the section where the culvert begins. with the dripping, there was a nuance to its rhythm distinct from its sounds outside of the tunnel. i was able to hear, but only by coming inside and joining the creek. we sat there together, in the dark, for a while.
it also meant sawing down a 20-foot-tall agave in order to save the seeds after the 30-something-year-old plant finally bloomed—with bright yellow flowers on branches shaped like coral—and then began to dry out and lean precariously. to keep the other plants safe, and to release some pressure from the agave, we cut its stalk and from it saved its branches, seed pods, and seeds. the pods are now hanging around the garden at the Land of Disturbance and Defiance as art.
i am principally interested in sound because i am interested in love, and when i imagine a decolonial soundwalk praxis, intimacy is surely at the center. this perspective offers a way of learning place from the position of a being who is co-creating it – not as a scientist but as a steward. a decolonial soundwalk praxis complicates traditional soundwalking’s aversion to the body. we cannot exist separate from the sonic space around us anymore than we can exist separately from the ecologies woven into our lives. to touch is to alter, and so the work here is to lean into the inevitability of connection, the impossibility of objectivity. a decolonial soundwalk praxis rejects the extraction of sound as data, pushing us instead to open our bodies/hearts/minds to receive the sounds of a place as the place is receiving us. how might we use sound to remove ourselves from the perspective of the observer? and what kind of responsibility to place does this open up? if we are a part of the places we are in and listening to, then surely we owe them reciprocity, love, conversation, patience; we must listen as we would a relative, a lover, or a friend.
i chose to record my final soundwalk at the garden on walnut and virginia street in berkeley, california, because it is a place that i know well and love dearly and i hoped to center that. the north side of the garden runs alongside strawberry creek.
rather than imposing a plan/route through the garden upon arriving, i allowed my relationship with the land to guide my movement through it. in my final mix, i layered pieces from this soundwalk together with selected excerpts from a meeting i attended with two fellow members of A.G.A.V.E., or Aspiring Gardeners Affirming Vibrant Ecologies (also Aspiring Gardeners Against Violent Extraction).in which we were trying to synthesize a manifesto using notes from previous conversations, itself a process of collective and layered creation. i chose to include portions of our conversation centered around ideas of relationship and care grounded in land, and i chose sounds from the walk that i feel hold in them intimacy and history:
∼∼∼the crows, who we feed every day and who plant seeds for us∼∼∼
∼∼∼the lock, which only those who know the land can open∼∼∼
∼∼∼and the marigolds, which we grow every year and which we harvest for offerings∼∼∼
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these sounds are proof of relationship. small sounds that are easy enough to forget to hear, but that are important to remember – and so i try, as i would for an invisible creek.
if a decolonial soundwalk praxis is anything, it is that love is listening, and so, my promise to invisible creeks (and all quiet[ed] sounds) everywhere is to lean a little closer,
and feel your whisper on my neck,
and to listen well,
and to take notes,
and to remember,
and to conspire.
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Featured Image: “California Pepper Tree” by Flickr user baird, CC BY-SA 2.0
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ameia camielle smith (they/she) is an aspiring gardener, dancer, and writer based in the san francisco bay area (Ohlone land). they are of mixed Afro-Indian ancestry and are greatly shaped by the seeds/shells/lives that exist at the intersection of these diasporas. ameia’s work is anchored in cultural ecologies and Black feminist geographies, and they are most inspired by stories of survival and collaboration between people and plants.
ameia received their B.A in geography from the university of california berkeley in may 2024. they are currently traveling through the southern united states where they are exploring maroon swamp geographies, tracing the steps of Zora Neale Hurston, and listening to the swampy cicada sounds of their childhood in north-central florida.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Flâneuse>La caminanta–Amanda Gutierrez
Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: Soundscapes of Canada and the Politics of Self-Recognition–Mitchell Akiyama
Soundwalking on the Edges: Sound, Safety and Privilege in São Paulo, Brazil—Paola Cossermelli Messina
El Caracol: A Stroll through Space and Time in Mexico City–Anthony Rasmussen
Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa
EPISODE 53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”
EPISODE 47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah–Marcella Ernest
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Greetings and welcome to our Spring Newsletter!
In this edition, you'll find a treasure trove of updates, interesting insights into our practices and industry practices, and an array of exciting new open-access books, videos, resources and more. Get ready to dive into a world of knowledge, innovation, and our upcoming releases. Here's a sneak peek at what's waiting for you inside:
Announcements
• Announcing the Winner of the 2024 GESIG Best Edited Book Award
• OBP Author Survey: Share Your Feedback!
• Open Access Books Network
• The PALOMERA project Survey
• Featured Article: Open-access books need more support from universities by Lucy Barnes
• Featured Blog Post: Where does the money go? Explaining our Library Membership Programme by Lucy Barnes
Books, Resources and Reviews
• Featured Books: Now in OA!
• New Open Access Publications
• Forthcoming Open Access Publications
• New Blogs, Articles and Resources
• Call for Proposals
• Latest Reviews
Announcing the Winner of the 2024 GESIG Best Edited Book Award
We are thrilled to announce that Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, has been awarded the 2024 GESIG Best Edited Book Award!
This groundbreaking collection, featuring contributions from academics and professionals spanning 17 countries and numerous disciplines, offers insightful perspectives on the future of higher education. In the face of ongoing challenges and crises, the book boldly reimagines the values and purpose of universities, advocating for a shift away from financial incentives and performance metrics towards a focus on resilience, collective action, and innovative solutions.
Read and download for free or get your own ebook or hard copy at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0363
OBP Author Survey: Share Your Feedback
Your input matters!
If you're an OBP author, contributor, or editor, we want to hear from you. Share your insights on our publishing process and help us better understand our community.
We're also keen to hear your suggestions on how we can enhance title dissemination and broaden our readership. Together, let's make OBP even better!
Access the survey now at https://forms.gle/SzhWX4wffAMbEkML9
Open Access Books Network
SIGN UP for the latest OABN webinar, free and open to all: 'How are open access associations supporting OA book publishing?' On Thursday 23 May at 2pm BST, join representatives of the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA) in the UK, the Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP) in Ireland, the New University Presses (NUPs) from the Netherlands, and the AG Universitätsverlage for German-speaking presses to discuss how these associations are supporting OA book publishing in their regions.
Access here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdSAWcJYHBQB9btjTEskIgcIyvd1JrO1cyMHeItKi4SPzAu6Q/viewform
The PALOMERA project Survey
The PALOMERA project, which is investigating OA book policymaking across Europe, has recently released their Knowledge Base. How might you use it? Let them know! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfJI3M0o4B7AZi6hWBMTFJUaUrM8a5fTdfT4hxlLG8LHde5Lg/viewform
You can also read this blog post about the recent PALOMERA-led event bringing together OA projects across Europe with a representative from the European Commission, to discuss their latest developments and how these projects contribute to a broader vision for open access: https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons.org/2024/05/01/creating-community-driven-pathways-to-equitable-open-scholarly-publishing-where-are-we-now/
Featured Article: Open-access books need more support from universities by Lucy Barnes
Our Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Lucy Barnes, has written a piece for Research Fortnight: 'Open-access books need more support from universities'.
Please read and share!
Featured Blog Post: Where does the money go? Explaining our Library Membership Programme by Lucy Barnes
Our Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Lucy Barnes, has written a new blog post where she delves into the Open Book Publishers' Library Membership Programme, detailing its pivotal role in supporting open access publishing while addressing what it funds, and why we also ask authors who are able to apply for funding to do so.
Read now at https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/where-does-the-money-go-explaining-our-library-membership-programme/
Featured Books: Now in OA!
Delve into the rich tapestry of intangible heritage with two captivating reads: A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape by Kathleen Ann Myers, translated by Grady C. Wray, and Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation edited by Lilia Makhloufi.
In A Country of Shepherds Myers intricately weaves together the life stories of shepherds and farmers in Spain's Andalusian region, offering profound insights into their cultural practices, traditions, and the intangible essence of their way of life. As these individuals navigate the challenges of their landscapes, their narratives provide a poignant reflection on the significance of intangible heritage amidst ecological shifts and global influences. From ancient traditions to contemporary challenges, this book paints a vivid portrait of the enduring cultural landscapes of the Mediterranean.
Complementing this exploration, Tangible and Intangible Heritage presents a diverse array of perspectives on heritage preservation across cultures and continents. Delving into the complex interplay between tangible sites and intangible practices, this collection offers critical insights into the dynamic nature of heritage in an increasingly interconnected world. From Algeria to Japan, each essay examines how tangible and intangible elements intertwine to shape cultural identities and communities, urging us to rethink traditional paradigms of preservation in the face of global challenges.
Together, these books invite readers on a journey to discover the intangible threads that weave through our cultural tapestry.
Access them now at:
A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0387
Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0388
New Open Access Publications
In addition to the two titles featured above, these past two months we have released another 13 new Open Access titles:
Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce by Hans Walter Gabler
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.
Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London by Leslie Howsam
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.
Byron and Trinity: Memorials, Marbles and Ruins by Adrian Poole
This is a collection of reprinted essays about the life and writing of Lord Byron and the themes of ‘memorials, marbles and ruins’ that were prominent in his thinking and feeling.
No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s by Frank Felsenstein
The letters and journals of Ernst Moritz and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, two German Jewish refugees caught in the tumultuous years leading to the Second World War, form the core of this book. Abridged in English from the original German, the correspondence and diaries have been expertly compiled and annotated by their only son who preserves his parents’ love story in their own words. Their letters, written from Germany, England, Russia, and Palestine capture their desperate efforts to save themselves and their family, friends and businesses from the fascist tyranny. The book begins by contextualizing the early lives of Moritz and Vera.
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context by Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context examines the translation and reception of Russian literature as a world-wide process. This volume aims to provoke new debate about the continued currency of Russian literature as symbolic capital for international readers, in particular for nations seeking to create or consolidate cultural and political leverage in the so-called ‘World Republic of Letters’. It also seeks to examine and contrast the mechanisms of the translation and uses of Russian literature across the globe.
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies edited by Philippe Tortell
Heavy Metal brings together world-leading experts from across the globe to reimagine the future of mineral exploration and mining in a post-fossil fuel world.
A Grammar of the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Gabes by Wiktor Gębski
This volume undertakes a linguistic exploration of the endangered Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of Gabes, a coastal city situated in Southern Tunisia. Belonging to the category of sedentary North African dialects, this variety is now spoken by a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily in Israel and France. Given the imminent extinction faced by many modern varieties of Judaeo-Arabic, including Jewish Gabes, the study's primary goal is to document and describe its linguistic nuances while reliable speakers are still accessible. Data for this comprehensive study were collected during fieldwork in Israel and France between December 2018 and March 2022.
(An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War edited by Mnemo ZIN
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of (An)Archive. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
No Prices No Games!: Four Economic Models by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein
While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions:
• A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will.
• A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden.
• A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent's choices.
• Systematic biases in agents' preferences.
The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition edited by Petri Hoppu, Egil Bakka and Anne Margrete Fiskvik
This major new anthology of the minuet in the Nordic countries comprehensively explores the dance as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon. One of the most significant dances in Europe, with a strong symbolic significance in western dance culture and dance scholarship, the minuet has evolved a distinctive pathway in this region, which these rigorous and pioneering essays explore.
Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 by Luke Clossey
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China.
Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia by Geoffrey Khan
This volume presents an edition of a corpus of Arabic documents data-ble to the 11th and 12th centuries AD that were discovered by the Egypt Exploration Society at the site of the Nubian fortress Qaṣr Ibrīm (situated in the south of modern Egypt).
Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution by Adrian Desmond
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
As always, these titles are freely available to read and download at www.openbookpublishers.com.
Forthcoming Open Access Publications
Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education: Exploring the Potential of Artistic Research edited by Helen Julia Minors, Stefan Östersjö, Gilvano Dalagna, Jorge Salgado Correia
This book contributes presenting examples of artistic research projects that are embedded within Higher Music Performance courses at universities and conservatoires across Europe.
Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert by Margaret Mehl
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills: Research in the Western Balkans and Western Europe edited by Blanka Bogunović, Renee Timmers, and Sanela Nikolić
This book features recent research on the psychology of music from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences by bringing it into productive conversation with complementary research from Western Europe and further afield.
The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents by Henrike Lähnemann, Eva Schlotheuber and Anne Simon
In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind? Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Trix: The Other Kipling by Barbara Fisher
This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.
Human Evolutionary Demography edited by Oskar Burger, Ronald Lee and Rebecca Sear
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
To find out more about this and other forthcoming titles visit: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/forthcoming
New Blogs, Articles and Resources
Blogs
[blog post] One woman’s challenge to the Victorian Legal Professions by Leslie Howsam
[blog post] “NO LIFE WITHOUT YOU”: REFUGEE LOVE LETTERS FROM THE 1930s by Frank Felsenstein
[blog post] On 'Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context' by Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer
[blog post] Unveiling The Human Journey by Frank Felsenstein
[blog post] How do languages die? The case of the Jewish Arabic dialect of Gabes (Southern Tunisia) by Wiktor Gębski
Articles
[article] Coming Soon: The Life of Nunsby Henrike Lähnemann
[article] The trials of migrant academics: The ‘Outsider Within’ at academic conferences (Ladan Rahbari & Olga Burlyuk)
Videos
[video] Godstow Abbey - the Life of Nuns Trailer
[video] 'Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London' - An Interview with Leslie Howsam
Call for Proposals
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Global Communications
Global Communications is a book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.
Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.
The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.
The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.
Applied Theatre Praxis
This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.
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Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.
Latest Reviews
Democratising Participatory Research: Pathways to Social Justice from the South by Carmen Martinez-Vargas
In this context, Martínez-Vargas presents a broad theoretical landscape, highlighting prominent authors of participatory approaches, their most relevant research contributions, ideas, and singularities. A unique aspect of this book is the invitation, in different moments of the text, to propose pluralist understandings of participatory approaches: not as a homogenous “participatory perspective”, but as a constellation of academic and political views which share family characteristics. This pluralist view offers an understanding of the changing and contextual character of participatory social theories. Specifically, it helps identify connections and elective affinities among four families of participatory approaches: a) an “industrial family”, or perspectives related to the world of labour; b) a “development family”, or approaches linked to debates on development and social change; c) an “indigenous family”, or views interested in intercultural and decolonial dialogues, and d) an “educational family”, or tendencies focused in democracy production of knowledge in pedagogical environments.In analysing these families of participatory views, the author recovers the academic sources, the central problems for social research, and the different understandings of the relationship between theories and practices.
César Osorio Sánchez
Journal of Human Development and Capabilities , 2024. doi:10.1080/19452829.2024.2330175
Ecocene Politics by Mihnea Tănăsescu
It is certainly the merit of Ecocene politics, a very carefully composed work that engages with many thinkers who commented on the Anthropocene, that it takes philosophy further to what political practice for this new era might mean. It ties together useful concepts, different traditions and concrete examples.
Nele Buyst
Environmental Values, 2024. doi:10.1177/09632719241245532
Ecocene Politics aims to ward off the paralysis that can afflict those who inherit a tragedy in progress. […] This [is] a book that will change conversations.
Lisa Disch
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
Ecocene Politics is a political theory that emerges from actual places and thinks through relations that are situated in landscapes and personal histories. This book offers something other than what readers might expect from political theory. […] It exemplifies a form of political thought that resonates closely with more-than-human geography.
Clemens Driessen
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
Ecocene Politics […] offers a wealth of trenchant insight and analysis, lucidly and passionately presented, for understanding the challenges and opportunities ahead.
David Bollier
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
Why am I not also tending to an olive tree, planting tomatoes, guiding the flock to pasture, or sailing on a sailboat? […] We are yet to ascertain whether this occasional inclination to put down the book is positive or negative. It might very well be positive, exactly what Tănăsescu was willing to inspire.
Xenia Chiaramonte and Marco Malavasi
The AAG Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 2, 2024. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315336
The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing by Amy Koerber, Jesse C. Starkey, Karin Ardon-Dryer, R. Glenn Cummins, Lyombe Eko and Kerk F. Kee
[...] what Koerber, Starkey and their coauthors have created here is a genuinely useful, coherent and clearly written text which will, I hope, become a valuable resource for early career researchers in particular. The book very effectively uses its focus of predatory journals as a window into the ever-shifting world of contemporary scholarly publishing.
David Barker, University of Derby
Publishing Research Quarterly, 2024. doi:10.1007/s12109-024-09984-2
The result is an impressive collection of chapters which summarise recent debates and report the authors’ own research examining the impact of these changes on the views of researchers and crucially their reading and publishing habits. [...] Overall I would strongly recommend this book and suggest that it should be required or background reading on research methods courses for doctoral and research masters programmes.
Huw Morris, Honorary Professor of Tertiary Education, UCL Institute of Education
Open@UCL Blog, 2024.
The Official Indonesian Qurʾān Translation: The History and Politics of Al-Qur’an dan Terjemahnya by Fadhli Lukman
Divided into seven chapters (plus concluding remarks) and organized around a chronological framework, this book is a scintillating read for those interested in the politics and perils of translation. It is a major addition to the growing literature on Islam in Southeast Asia.
Khairudin Aljunied
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2024. doi:10.1093/jis/etae011
Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné by Bendi Tso, Marnyi Gyatso, Naljor Tsering and Mark Turin acting as Trustees for the Members of the Choné Tibetan Community
More importantly, the book is an invaluable documentation of an oral tradition that is hanging by its thread, made accessible because of the translation of the stanzas into English and Mandarin.
Kunda Dixit
Nepali Times, 2024.
Une anthologie des textes de Florence Piron
Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Que veut dire « Gravité des choses »? Grave ne veut pas dire terrifiant, inquiétant, stressant. Ce mot désigne les grandes questions de la vie, les questions qui ont le pouvoir de faire souffrir ou de construire, de détruire ou d’éveiller, qui permettent de ramener à l’essentiel derrière le bruit de la vie quotidienne, les énervements dans lesquels on peut s’enfoncer sans raison et surtout sans savoir comment émerger.
« C’est avec ces mots que Florence Piron (disparue en 2021) [a] débuté en 2019 l’écriture de son livre La gravité des choses – expression née de la bouche de son plus jeune fils, qui lui avait déclaré, vers l’âge de dix ans, que son grand frère ne « comprenait pas la gravité des choses ». Séduite par cette expression toute simple et renvoyant pourtant à un monde immense, Florence [a] décidé d’intituler ainsi le livre qu’elle projetait depuis longtemps d’écrire. Celui-ci aurait constitué l’aboutissement de toutes ses réflexions, issues non seulement de sa carrière de professeure-chercheuse à l’Université Laval, mais aussi de sa vie de femme, de mère, de militante et d’éditrice. » (Sarah-Anne Arsenault, extrait de l’avant-propos)
ISBN : à venir
DOI : à venir
970 pages
Coordination et édition : Sarah-Anne Arsenault
Révision linguistique et féminisation : Sarah-Anne Arsenault, Maryvonne Charmillot, Célya Gruson-Daniel, Zoé Lüthi
Design de la couverture : Kate McDonnell, photographies de Laure-Hélène Piron et Érika Nimis, photomontage d’Audrey Legerot, sur une idée de Florence Piron
Date de publication : 6 juin 2024
***
Table des matières
(à venir)
What is a music video, anyway? Historically dismissed by film theorists as cinematically flawed or by the public as mere promotional snippets, music videos didn’t used to get the credit they deserve as a serious artistic medium. In the 1990s, Carol Vernallis challenged both notions, suggesting that they are actually a unique genre where music and visuals aren’t just paired—they communicate deeply with each other. Since then, scholars have taken diverse approaches to try to make sense of how film theory is applicable to these delicious nuggets of musical storytelling. For example, Phoebe Macrossan argues that Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a signal example of “film worlding,” indicating how the artist uses video to create her own intimate and all-encompassing environment. Additionally, Olu Jenzen and colleagues have found that political remix videos use recombinations of existing sounds and images to make rhetorical points that can challenge mainstream media reporting in real time. According to Stan Hawkins and Tore Størvold, from the perspectives of musicology or music theory, perhaps it is the video that amplifies the song’s harmonic structure or musical form, as suggested by their analysis of Justin Timberlake’s “Man of the Woods.”
Through skillful harmonic analysis or rhetorical analysis or cataloging of film techniques, scholars and critics now take music videos seriously. Yet, across interdisciplinary research approaches to music videos, what is largely taken for granted is that the music video is an object, a work to which various theories can be applied. What if we extend these approaches further and consider the music video not just as an object of analysis to be dissected, but as a representation of a creative process that entwines sound and vision in innovative ways to connect people and forge relationships? Such an analysis is especially possible when listening to independent creators who take an active role in conceptualizing, shooting, and editing their videos. By shifting our perspective to view the music video as documenting an ongoing creative and relational journey rather than solely as an object for analysis, we open up new possibilities for understanding the deeper significance of these works. Music videos can serve not just as vehicles for artistic expression, but as catalysts for strengthening bonds, preserving cultural knowledge, and fostering a sense of pride and resilience within communities.
In 2023, I co-organized a series of performances for Native Jam Night at UC Riverside, an annual music showcase featuring Indigenous artists from California and across Turtle Island. One way my colleagues and I honed in on guest artists was by asking students to listen to several playlists and recommend the music that spoke to them. The song “Revitalize” by T-Rhyme came up as a favorite. T-Rhyme has released music that tells personal stories and responds to contemporary social realities. At times, this music responds to her lived experience as a woman with Nehiyaw and Denesuline roots.
The music video for “Revitalize” is not only a popular extension of the song’s appeal, but an audiovisual series of connections and interactions. Paying attention to it in this way shows what can emerge from one kind of nontraditional listening posture, this one inspired by my conversations with T-Rhyme and also grounded in the way I have been opening my ears to her music. I first got to know T-Rhyme in-person when I invited her and MC Eekwol to perform as part of the Show & Prove hip hop event in 2018. We stayed in touch over the next several years.
As part of T-Rhyme’s return visit to California in 2023, we got to drive around and talk music business, have dinner with Native directors and actors as part of an Indigenous Storytelling event, go shopping, and get tacos at one of my favorite hole-in-the-wall spots. When it came time to make plans around the release for my book Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams, I knew it made sense to keep building on dialogues with musicians. Instead of just talking about myself, or even ideas that were already published, I wanted to keep the conversation going, continue listening, and find ways to share what I was hearing with more audiences. When I talked with T-Rhyme in the winter and spring of this year, then, it was to hear more about her creative process beyond any single project, to talk about what I was hearing and how I was listening, and to make space for that meaning making that almost approaches a musical flow that can bubble up out of a good dialogue.
A years-long process led up to “Revitalize,” T-Rhyme told me, and there are goals for the song that stretch beyond the moment of recording. To make the video, T-Rhyme went out to ceremonial grounds with her family and her photographer cousin Tennille Campbell’s family, spending time out with buffalo so Campbell could record. Looking back, she went through over a year and a half of her recordings of family and friends to select moments of daily life to interweave with special moments of celebration.
To convey the importance of land with viewers, the rapper worked with her brother, who shared his drone landscape footage that he recorded where he lives in northern Saskatchewan. She filmed other pieces at a powwow in Treaty Six territory in Alberta, finding inspiration from old friends she reconnected with for the occasion, as well as other Indigenous musicians and dancers she met while looking to connect there. T-Rhyme delivers the chorus and rapped verses over a beat by Doc Blaze, while collaborators in the music video mouth key words, notably “revitalize,” to her audio. Each aspect of the video was made with family or friends, and together they encompass years of work and hopes for the future.
From her past work, T-Rhyme recalled that shooting a music video can be stressful and involve intense time pressure. Instead, she told me, “I wanted none of those vibes to be involved with this project. I wanted the whole entire thing to be good vibes. And positive because part of our healing is through laughter and joking and being together as family.”
So, what is “revitalization” in the context of making music with family and friends? For T-Rhyme, “These are people I trust, I grew with, I evolved with, I changed with. All these people make me feel good and that I’m proud of, that I want to show off.” Paying attention to how musicians choose to tell their stories and further relationships with others is part of recognizing their sovereignty through sound. Sonic sovereignty is an active process.
The notion of “sonic sovereignty” builds from Jolene Rickard’s determination in “Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art,” that “the idea of our art serving Indigenous communities reinforced my understanding that sovereignty is more than a legal concept”(82), and Tewa and Dine scholar-filmmaker Beverly Singer’s working through what she refers to as “cultural sovereignty,” in Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video, “which involves trusting in the older ways and adapting them to our lives in the present”(2). It’s meaningful to move into celebration together, as T-Rhyme explains: “Part of revitalization, especially when it comes to our healing as Native people, is we need to remember love. We don’t need to be in survival mode all the time.”
Generations of T-Rhyme’s family stretch throughout the video for “Revitalize”. In the first verse, the musician’s mother stands in a bright red ribbon skirt at the edge of the river, near a photo frame.Then this photo of the rapper’s grandparents smiles out from the rocky shores of a river. A kid in sneakers runs nimbly over these same rocks, generations converging at the water. When T-Rhyme raps in the chorus, “raise your fists high in the air right now,” viewers see her mother raising her fist, the river greenery behind her, then proudly holding the picture of her own parents.
Music videos are often associated with youth culture, especially in a North American context. Yet in process and in content, this music video showcases intergenerational teaching and learning, with the involvement of elders, parents, children, and friends, connecting embodied knowledge across generations. Men and boys teaching intergenerationally feature onscreen, notably a father and son in regalia and an entrepreneur who runs Cree Coffee Company. Community leaders and scholars across Turtle Island share stories of diverse Indigenous masculinities, highlighting the kinds of teaching, leadership, and care that men, boys, and masculine people share from the present into the future. T-Rhyme reflected, “we have men out here who are trying to be warriors still, in their own way, whether they’re dancing powwow, whether they’re running their own business, and just being present fathers.”
T-Rhyme described that over the years, her relationship with her mother has changed. And yet, they have an ongoing push and pull between being serious and being playful together. With her mom, she says, “laughter and joking is our medicine.” She laughed as she recalled that for filming, “we’d be trying to have a serious moment and I’d say ‘okay mom, stand in the water’ and she’d say, ‘okay, like this.’ ‘Yeah, that looks good. Rest your face. You look real Kookum right now.’ Just cracking jokes at her.” T-Rhyme uses a word for grandmother to kid with her mom.
The process of writing the lyrics, too, involved reflecting on the relationship she has had with her mom across the past, present, and future. T-Rhyme raps, “My mother is sacred, she’s a survivor for real, though it’s taken her and I so many decades to heal.” This comes from what the rapper describes as a way to highlight how her mom is a “survivor and somebody that I respect and ultimately, enabled and motivated me to do my own healing too.”
In the context of intergenerational healing, T-Rhyme’s music video, which involves multiple generations of her family, embodies Indigenous survivance –the active transition from mere survival to resilience—in the face of historical and ongoing colonial violence. T-Rhyme brought her grandparents into the filming through their photograph, and their living memory. She explained, “Without them, I wouldn’t be here, my kids wouldn’t be here and my mom wouldn’t be here. Speaking of revitalization, they were the ones that were the front lines of maintaining our culture through a literal, cultural genocide in our communities.” Since “they really had to do their part in maintaining our culture enough to survive through residential school,” she recalls, “It was important to me to acknowledge them as survivors.”
T-Rhyme included her daughter in ‘Revitalize,” as well as in other music videos, notably the title track on “For Women By Women.” She explains, “I always want to feature her because she’s such a powerhouse.” T-Rhyme’s visual narrative brings in a photo of her daughter dancing at one of her shows, and the rapper has made music videos with her son as well.
When they were all getting stir-crazy from COVID shutdowns, T-Rhyme and her kids made the video “Trap’d,” for which the rapper helped then-12-year-old Joaquem act as videographer. Teaching her son and daughter and giving them space to make their own art, she calls her kids her “heroes,” explaining, “I just love including them where I can.”
Watching and listening to the work of independent artists, such as T-Rhyme, complements existing writing on music video that comments on mainstream names like Madonna and Beyoncé. Furthermore, approaching music videos as processes through which relationships are built and furthered rather than solely as objects for analysis invites other forms of listening, especially modes that acknowledge the network of people whose interactions create the sounds that vibrate audience members’ eardrums.
The people who click play on the finished music video make up what is traditionally understood as its audience. By witnessing relationships behind musical choices, we can recognize that there is another group, too, that the video is for: media professionals, family members, and community participants who work together to create it. Making a piece as complicated as a music video can become an occasion for all of these actors to further and strengthen relationships: filming may offer the excuse everyone needed to visit an important location together, or storyboarding brings people in the room together who hadn’t been able to find the time, or the song provides a vehicle for talking about a topic that would otherwise be repeatedly put on the shelf for another day. Listening for process in this way can encourage audience members who view the video, too, to use this communally crafted artistic labor as an invitation for connection.
“Revitalize” particularly serves as an example of how making a music video can involve collaboration with family and friends over an extended period, encompassing years of documentation and strengthening relationships. In addition to sharing a past and inspiring interaction for the making of the video, the song carries hopes for a future. As T-Rhyme says, “I want “Revitalize” to be a catalyst for healing and pride.” Paying attention to how musicians tell their stories and build relationships through music videos is part of recognizing their sovereignty and cultural continuity through sound and visuals.
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Featured Image: Still from music video for “Revitalize” by T-Rhyme (2021)
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Dr. Liz Przybylski (pronunciation) is an ethnomusicologist and pop music scholar working in hip hop and electronic music in the US and Canada. Dr. Przybylski is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside. A graduate of Bard College (BA) and Northwestern University (MA, PhD), Liz’s research appears in Ethnomusicology, Journal of Borderlands Studies, and IASPM Journal, among others. Dr. Przybylski has presented research nationally and internationally, including at the Society for Ethnomusicology, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Feminist Theory and Music, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and International Council for Traditional Music World Conferences. Recent and forthcoming publications analyze how the sampling of heritage music in Indigenous hip hop contributes to dialogues about cultural change in urban areas. Dr. Przybylski has also published on popular music pedagogy. Liz was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Liz’s most recent book Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams was published in July 2023 (NYU Press). This follows Liz’s first book, Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between (SAGE Publications, 2020) which develops an innovative model of hybrid on- and off-line ethnography for the analysis of expressive culture. In addition to university teaching, Liz has taught adult and pre-college learners at the American Indian Center in Chicago and the Concordia Language Villages program of Concordia College in Bemidji. On the radio, Liz hosted the world music show “Continental Drift” on WNUR in Chicago and has conducted interviews with musicians for programs including “At The Edge of Canada: Indigenous Research” on CJUM in Winnipeg. Dr. Przybylski served as the Media Reviews Editor for the journal American Music, the President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Southern California and Hawaii Chapter, and on the Society for Ethnomusicology Council.
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by Bruce Gaston
The closing of Fenwick’s department store on New Bond Street a couple of weeks ago adds another name to the long list of the capital’s once prominent, now defunct palaces of shopping: Debenhams, Dickins & Jones, D H Evans, Bourne & Hollingsworth, Marshall & Snelgrove, Swan & Edgar, Multevey & Princk, Walpurgis & Nettlepink, Goliath & Mastodon...
Readers, particularly those familiar with London, may by this stage be smelling a rat – surely there can’t have been a department store called “Goliath & Mastodon”? Of course there wasn't: the last three were invented by the Edwardian writer Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen-name ‘Saki’.
The last of them features in his story ‘Fur’: “In the near distance rose the colossal pile of Messrs. Goliath and Mastodon’s famed establishment”. It was during the Edwardian period that many department stores’ flagship buildings were built (just think of Selfridge’s on Oxford Street, or Harrod’s in Knightsbridge) and for that reason many people associate department stores with that era. The new style of shopping, with its glamour and gimmicks, intended to appeal to a female clientele, also offered potential for social satire. In ‘Louise’, the absent-minded Jane Thropplestance is unsure which store she visited earlier that afternoon. “[...] Perhaps it was Harrod’s. I really don’t remember. It was one of those places where every one [sic is so kind and sympathetic and devoted that one almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such pleasant surroundings.”
I was prompted to think about Saki and department stores when I rediscovered a short text of his inside a newspaper advertisement for Selfridge’s. Munro (1870-1916) was a freelance writer specialising in short stories, and as such published his work in whichever journal or periodical would accept it. His death in the First World War meant he never had the chance to prepare a comprehensive collection of his tales in book form. If you are already a Saki fan and own one of the many “Complete Short Stories” on the market, then I have to break it to you: it isn’t complete. Over twenty forgotten stories have turned up since the 1960s. Finding them used to be a hit-and-miss affair that entailed trawling through microfilms of likely publications. But these days the task is much simpler thanks to the digitisation of newspapers so that one can run a full-text search on their contents. Certainly, I would never have thought to look in the London Daily News and Leader, as this was not one of Munro’s regular outlets.
Munro’s story is called ‘The Romance of Business’ (not to be confused with ‘Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business’, published in The Square Egg and Other Sketches) and was commissioned as part of Selfridge’s fifth birthday celebrations in 1914.
As anyone who watched the TV series ‘Mr Selfridge’ will know, Selfridge & Co. was one of the grandest and most innovative department stores in the British Isles. It was also pioneering in terms of publicity. (The public appearance in the store of Louis Blériot, the first man to fly across the Channel, along with his monoplane, was depicted in the first series.) Munro’s text appeared within a special full-page advertisement and is surrounded by an elaborate illustration of laden men, trucks and even elephants passing through an ornate classical archway on their way to a dock with cargo ships. Selfridge’s commissioned several such illustrations from noted artists, complemented by short texts on subjects such as “The Dignity of Work”, “Imagination” and “Markets of the World”, and had them printed in a number of prominent newspapers. “It is possible that no more remarkable ads than these have been produced in the entire history of retail advertising,” gushed trade paper Dry Goods Economist. Munro, though a well-known and successful writer, was small fry compared to some of the contributors Selfridge's managed to secure. Other ads in the series contained testimonials from Prince Guido Henckel von Donnersmark (German nobility and one of the richest men in Europe to boot) and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, whose celebrity reached around the globe.
Munro’s tale, raved the Dry Goods Economist, deals “with the great principle that all work worth doing has a broader appeal to the mind than mere mental exercise–has its spiritual side.” I wonder. While he may have been happy to pocket the Selfridge shilling, Munro’s real view was probably closer to what he put into the mouth of one of the two young ladies in ‘Fur’: “even quite good shops have their counters and windows crowded with things worth about four shillings that look as if they might be worth seven-and-six, and are priced at ten shillings and labelled seasonable gifts.” Business, Munro implies, is all about how much one pays.
You can read ‘The Romance of Business’ in the forthcoming Saki (H. H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories, which I have edited and annotated for OBP. OBP books, by the way, are free.
References
‘Ad Critic’, Dry Goods Economist, v.68:3, October 3, 1914, p. 205, online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112064273458&view=1up&seq=931&q1=saki
Guardian, ‘“I’m devastated it’s closing”: London shoppers say farewell to Fenwick’, 2 Feb. 2024, online at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/02/fenwick-london-new-bond-street-department-store-close?ref=biztoc.com
Saki, ‘Fur’, in Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914, online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/269
Saki, ‘Louise’, in The Toys of Peace and Other Papers, 1919, online at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/269
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
