Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual ed. by Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy (review)

The opening pages of this edited collection urgently invite us to attune our sensibilities to the vibrancy and clamour of the world around, and open ourselves up to multisensory works of art that contest sensorial, discursive and social hierarchies. Focusing on critical and creative practices that unfold at the oral/written interface, the essays in the collection and the performance pieces recorded on the volume's companion website (http://drc.usask.ca/projects/oral) foreground artistry - from the dub poetry of d'bi.young.anitafrika and Paul Dutton's sound art to Waziyatawin's found poems cum intimate storytelling and the hybrid works of 'painteroralstorytellingpagebasedpoetscholarfilmmakerorganiser' (p. 305) Neal McLeod - which elides conventional literary standards, whilst bearing important knowledge for socially and politically marginalised groups. In this sense, if part of Gingell and Roy's agenda is to develop an awareness of the aesthetic qualities of artistic practices that the critical establishment has all too frequently dismissed, the essays in the collection furthermore contest the assumed binary between orality and literacy, reiterating the conclusion that a print- and verbal-centric culture has brought about the 'reduction, alienation and impairment' of meaning-making and artistic expression (p. 13). The integration of the visual medium into the orality/literacy interface - something that distinguishes Gingell and Roy's collection from its predecessors - adds another important dimension to the contextualisation and transmission of multiply embodied knowledges and specific cultural practices.

With its conversational overtones, disciplinary transgressions and cultural crossovers, Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is an engaging and stimulating critical-creative opus. In the introductory essay, the editors offer an informative overview of the terminological apparatus mobilised by the contributors, and place the collection within a wider creative and theoretical tradition. The essays, reflections and performance pieces included in Part I, 'Listening Up', critically explore and enact various aspects of orality (performativity, audience participation, textual transmission and pedagogy), whereas the discussions in Part II and III, 'Writing Down' and 'Looking Beyond', respectively, focus on the textualisation of orality in different contexts (British, Irish, South African, North American) and the ethical implications and political underpinnings of such encodings and transmissions. Although at times the discussions seem uneven - with contributions in Part III more exclusively focused on the multidimensionality of Aboriginal oratures and their significance for indigenous sovereignty and historiography in North America compared to the more geographically and historically dispersed essays in Part II - there are nonetheless sufficient thematic and theoretical links between the contributions across all sections to make the transnational and transhistorical dialogues within the collection cohere overall. Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is a compelling read and will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of literature and orature, life-writing and historiography, mixed-media writing and performance poetry.