Response to “On Leaving Things Out” by Lee Veeraraghavan

When Carter Mathes invited me to think with him about who might offer compelling responses to and critiques of Hungry Listening, I was quick to suggest that we approach Lee Veeraraghavan. This was of course because of her research on settler colonialism, listening, and R. Murray Schafer, but more importantly because of what I sensed was a strong critique of Hungry Listening that I believed I didn’t fully understand. Given what I thought I understood—that Lee’s critique centered upon my use of positionality—I at first invited her to join a conversation with Ellen Waterman and Deborah Wong where that might be a subject for discussion between the three of them. When Lee responded to this invitation noting that she had “some trepidations about [her] ability to engage this material and [my] book, and in that particular format” I assumed that it simply wasn’t a good fit for what she was thinking she might contribute. She also asked if we might find a time for a Zoom conversation about what she said was a sensitive topic. When that time came, what Lee shared with me was much more destabilizing than the critique I had anticipated: She felt I had plagiarized her work. To name my response shock does not quite capture the distinctive mix of nausea, confusion, and fear I felt upon hearing the words “you” and “plagiarized” directed toward me. It’s perhaps one of the best examples of the liminal quality of affect I have experienced. After finding my bearings again, I remember stumbling through an apology. In that moment, I assumed I must have internalized Lee’s ideas without realizing it, and then taken them up as my own, as Nair argues in her concept of “soft plagiarism.” As someone who has had work plagiarized by a former supervisor in the introduction to an edited volume, I have felt particularly sensitive when others have shared their destabilizing experiences of plagiarism. In my own experience, when I confronted this scholar, they vigorously denied any wrongdoing, despite my retaining the original document that contained ideas specific to Stó:lō cultural knowledge.In the wake of my conversation with Lee, I spiraled into an anxious forensic investigation of my own activities, conducted through a review of emails, past conference presentations, and writings, and piecing together my life from eight years ago. From this investigation, I could see that I had given several public presentations of my work on the Indigenous ontology of song, focused on Delgamukw v the Queen and extractivist listening between March 2015 and October 2016, before reading any of Lee's work. Additionally, I had sent the full book manuscript on September 1, 2016—including work on Schafer and Delgamukw v the Queen, as well as my theoretical framework that brought the concept of hungry listening into relationship with writing on extractivism—to Ellen Waterman and Deborah Wong for a manuscript workshop in Kingston, Ontario.1 Yet while this background check helped me feel that I had not inadvertently committed “soft plagiarism,” none of this explained the question of why Lee’s dissertation did not register with me as a central and important work to be brought into conversation with my sqwalewel (thinking-feeling) in Hungry Listening. For that picture to become clearer I needed to return to my own work circumstances. Returning to the time of Lee’s dissertation submission through the record of our email correspondence reminded me that there was a correlative though different expression of the “neoliberal academy’s demand for haste and quantity” in my own experience.2What follows is an outline of how such demand had the unanticipated effect of distorting the clarity of how Lee’s work inhabited my thinking. When Lee first sent me the first three chapters of her dissertation on November 6, 2016, the defense date had been scheduled by the department for November 16. But when Lee could not send the remaining parts of the dissertation by November 13, and when I added up the travel and teaching I needed to do in the two days before the defense, I realized there was no way I could fit reading the dissertation into my schedule. I wrote to her to ask if it would be possible to reschedule the defense. In retrospect, I marvel at the fact that I was even considering that I might be able to give a thorough read of a 200-page dissertation in two days—let alone two weeks—with teaching and travel to do in between. Eventually, it was decided that the defense should be rescheduled to sometime between December and February, though I noted that before January would be best for me, since my wife and I were expecting our first child in late January.Indeed, our daughter Chloe arrived in the world on January 24, and my wife and I began figuring out how to be parents, and how to juggle parenting and work together. I then didn’t hear from Lee between our correspondence in November and January 31. On January 31 Lee sent her full dissertation and asked if I would be available for a defense on February 17. I was already slated to be teaching and in meetings that day, so I responded that I would only be available on February 20 or after. Lee said she would check with her committee, but I did not hear from her again after this. In an email to Lee’s supervisor on February 14 I wrote: “I’m a little surprised that the 17th has now been set as the date, but also realize that I’m only one of many people who have busy schedules to accommodate. I can try to read and comment on as much of it on Thursday as possible, but cannot actually join the defense on the 17th.”My apologies to readers for taking up so much space here with this overly detailed timeline. I do so to note the material circumstances of the common expectation that academics read thoroughly and quickly on short notice. I can confidently say that I have not been able to complete anything thoroughly after becoming a parent! I do understand the exigencies here—students needing to complete before additional tuition fees are charged, and in this particular case the terrible and traumatic conditions Lee outlines whose toll I can only imagine. Yet to consider circumstances and the material conditions of academic labor means here noting my lack of capacity to read well and thoroughly, or simply to read at all. On February 15 I followed up with Lee’s supervisor, who had asked me to send a few questions to Lee in lieu of my presence at the defense. I wrote: “I’m sorry to say I could only read up to page 120 today in depth, and scan the rest. I have a newborn at home, and so can’t work into the night (as we often do).”My failing to read Lee’s work at this crucial moment in her research process was not the only material circumstance that had significant ramifications, however. By not having the ability to be in conversation with Lee as part of her defense—and as the only member of her committee with the same research area as Lee—I also was unable to share my own thinking on Delgamukw, on Schafer, and on extractivism, and for such discussion to lead to distinctions, challenges, and new insights on both our parts. It made it impossible to think together. To note these conditions does not abdicate my responsibility to have returned to Lee’s work as I revised Hungry Listening.Despite embarrassment, I name these circumstances here as they significantly affected the clarity by which I remembered Lee’s dissertation research. Among the voices that I heard during my own thinking, writing, and revising, Lee’s was not there in large part because I had in fact not adequately engaged her work. In contrast, I wouldn’t be surprised if the expectation of citation was more significant because a graduate student’s committee is supposed to be the most familiar with their work. Above all, despite a commitment to citing and engaging other graduate student and early career scholars’ work in Hungy Listening (Dangeli, Lukin Linklater, De Line, and Wilson, among others,), I failed to do so in this instance. Not only had I failed to cite Lee’s work, but I failed to engage it in Hungry Listening in what could have led to exactly the productively agonistic dialogue I think we both desire. The ramifications of this oversight are clear from Lee’s account.To partially answer Lee’s question about the exclusion of her work, then, I want to amplify her point about how, in the breakneck speed with which scholarship takes place, things get left out, and people get left behind.3 I don’t need to remind those reading here of the ways we struggle and fail at finding time (as if it were simply “hiding” from us) and making time (as if there were simply a recipe) in the all-too-familiar scenario of academic over-extension that includes both self-expectations and external demands. It is in this context that a colleague recently noted how they simply would wake up at 4 a.m. or go to sleep at 2 a.m. in order to squeeze in their work before their baby woke up/after their child went to sleep. Overwork and overcommitment in academia are ubiquitous, particularly for women and other marginalized scholars expected to take up the significant institutional work of decolonization and antiracism. I revised Hungry Listening from within the breakneck pace of being in the first years of my first academic appointment, of being a new parent, and of being stretched in the 100 different directions Indigenous academics get stretched in, particularly in those first years following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It was in this context that much was left out of Hungry Listening, including an engagement with Lee’s dissertation.In the speed of academic production there is equal possibility for what Katherine McKittrick calls the “wearing down” of thought through our writing. More specifically, McKittrick writes about the citation of NorbeSe Phillips’s poem “Zong!” as part of how—through citation—Black women’s thought can remain unread:I was told to cite black women. We are told to cite black women. Sometimes the words and ideas of black women, when cited, become something else. Sometimes the ideas of black women wear out and wear down even though these narratives provide the clues and instructions to imagine the world anew. Often the words and ideas and brilliance of black women remain unread. The words and ideas of black women go uncited. The intellectual effort is unnoticed and stepped over and swept aside. Worn down, sometimes the intellectual work of black women is unmentionable. We must continue to cite their words and ideas well. We must read them well.4McKittrick here asserts how citation itself can serve as a way to “wear down” the capaciousness of ideas that are cited through mere citation; that is, by not situating one’s work in deep conversation with such ideas. Or, as Michael Veal has recently offered in a review of Philip Ewell’s citational practice in On Music Theory, “community is not achieved by citation—it is achieved by immersion”5 And so, belatedly, humbly, I would like to conclude this response by engaging Lee’s dissertation as a way to highlight some of the exceptional and original contributions it makes. While I offer this retrospective citation and attempt to read her words and ideas well as a form of minor repair, I am aware that there is little compensation that might make for the emotional turmoil and paralysis one might feel in the scenario that Lee identifies, of “living in a state of paranoia.” It is equally disheartening to have to contend with those who base their understanding of originality upon a property model of exclusive research subject. Colonization is more than a mere metaphor in this model of scholarship, where research expertise is conflated with a felt ownership of topics, and originality is based not on the thought we bring to bear on events, history, and subjects but on the propriety of work that claims those subjects. It is important here to offer some distinction between Lee and my thought specifically on the subject of R. Murray Schafer’s work and the Delgamukw v the Queen, and generally in the context of what her dissertation seeks to achieve and what Hungry Listening sets out to do. It is important not for the sake of disambiguation itself, but in order to acknowledge the vibrant originality of each.As Lee writes, her dissertation is centrally concerned with:the ways the Canadian nation-state and settler society mobilize the field of aurality to place limits on the expression of Indigenous dissent, and to define the subjectivity of Indigenous peoples fighting oil and gas pipelines and displacement from their homes. Oil and gas pipelines, as well as urban development projects, pose a threat to the self-determination of Indigenous peoples. The ways that the Canadian settler colonial state and society mobilize hearing, including hearing as recognition, suggests that when we listen to difference in contemporary Canada, it is with dirty ears—resulting in polluted lands.6Lee’s work here remains steadfastly grounded in its commitment to naming the material conditions of settler colonialism: oil and gas pipeline development and its displacement of Indigenous people and the state’s attempt to sidestep their inherent rights, and the ways the state seeks to curtail Indigenous dissent. One of the singular contributions Lee’s dissertation—and her work more comprehensively—makes is in the way it speaks from this place of commitment grounded in her long-term direct participation in pipeline activism with Indigenous people in Vancouver. Drawing on the work that Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish call “convocation,”7 Lee’s writing is to my mind an exemplar of activist scholarship that seeks to write alongside “communities that are themselves in flux” (60), rather than providing a report on others.While Lee notes that the circumstances of her fieldwork from 2012 to 2014 meant it was impossible (nor desirable) to center an ethnographic account, the writing is indelibly guided by the stakes, language, and centering of Indigenous resistance Lee participated in during those years.8 An ethnographic account of such fieldwork was not the subject of the dissertation, but Lee’s commitment to the activist communities she worked with, and the material conditions that underpin such resistance, are thoroughly present. I am able to feel the stakes of this engagement not just at the level of content but often at what might be called the direct action structure and focus at the level of the sentence and paragraph. They are present through a persistent refusal to report on Indigenous resistance to pipeline development, given how such reporting is, as Lee notes, often used against such communities.Though more conservative music scholars might balk at the pairing of Schafer and pipeline hearings, Lee asserts the need to consider their shared ideological underpinning. As she writes, “despite their apparent opposition,” Schafer’s work and pipeline hearings “have common colonial roots in the aural production of difference, and the liberal politics of recognition by which that difference is managed today” (19). She amplifies this focus in Chapter 4 in particular, which “outlines how activist art is so successful at ‘claiming space’ while nevertheless losing ground—literally—in the fight against gentrification and displacement” (26). The dissertation provides a compelling constellation that charts the interconnection of aesthetic action (often, though not exclusively sonic) taking place in pipeline hearings in the unceded Coast-Salish lands now known as Vancouver, in the process gentrification in the downtown eastside, in Indigenous activism, and in the compositions of R. Murray Schafer. While I am not able to retrace the sophisticated analyses of all of this work here, I want to offer an overview of what I consider to be the comprehensive approach she takes to Schafer and Delgamukw v the Queen, given that these are two particular areas of correspondence in our work.Lee devotes the large majority of Chapter 2 to Schafer, and in particular examines “how Schafer’s use of language and graphic notation suggests a sonorous order of things that inscribes the material world and its politics, through readings of ecologically themed compositions” (69) and “deconstructing key compositions that feature ecological themes” (70). Her analysis of Schafer’s work includes a particular focus on his use of language in Loving/Toi (1965) and Epitaph for Moonlight (1971). This focus continues through her examination of North/White’s program note “to show how Schafer’s treatment of language, and the world in and his use of graphic notation a relationship that in the contemporary world as a of colonial In these her is to how Schafer the distinction music and language, to the effect that in In so, Schafer’s work the by which the capacity of Indigenous words to is writing focused on Delgamukw and in the way was by and into the discussion and work on Indigenous and the that the by then, can be as to in that both in of and This of two of Lee’s dissertation research is not able to engage the full and capaciousness of the ideas offered and the Yet in both I it is this that sets Lee’s dissertation as a reading of Delgamukw v the Queen and Schafer’s important distinction between our work is that while Lee provides significant discussion of the of in there is in fact no of the significant of specifically in Delgamukw v the The of song, in contrast, is the exclusive focus of Hungry Listening in order to its distinction as an Indigenous discussion of is exclusive to my of its alongside the I am concerned with Schafer’s music in this only as it the of both on the same this that Schafer’s work the used to the of in the the The is to of in the as if they are simply different of Lee’s detailed examination of Schafer’s work, Hungry Listening often Schafer’s as part of his to reading from that experience, the possibility for and in Hungry Listening both Schafer and Delgamukw as rather than the of engagement with that Lee’s dissertation while Lee that her examination of settler colonial listening through by Canadian settler might into the background of mere I would contend that it is exactly this level of and focus that the exceptional of Lee’s work. Yet it is not the and focus in itself that distinction in her work, but her analysis of how Schafer’s work is by the material conditions of and Indigenous was reading I that readers it as in its and to my this is I am aware that not on the is in a to a and colleague over such a a does little to the we both those in to which I could not do in this response what I as a case of into a of institutional in with my own of and within a at this moment in led to my And his engagement with my dissertation after the fact me into the such that I am made I am both to and to Carter Mathes for making this also some of the and the academic form of our can I am about the in which I as focus on the can to in for a commitment to and I am aware that the material and of are not so Yet I am that this as an of engagement on if I have as to and the of into It is no than what of such

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