March 7, 2025 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall, 4th floor
Hearing the Calls of Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resurgence in Public Art
Dylan Robinson
Associate Professor, University of British Columbia
Althusser’s infamous scene of interpellation features a police officer hailing (shouting? yelling? stern-toned enunciating?) “Hey you there!”. In turning toward the call, Althusser claims, we are constituted as subjects. In this example, we are presented with a figure of the state commanding attention through a singular call that represents ideology. Yet subjectivity is not constituted through a singular address alone. We are at once called and re-called; we refuse the call (stop calling stop calling…) and are whispered to by ideology—or ideological state apparatuses, in Althusser’s terms—in our encounters with the everyday, by the minute, by the near- and far-perceptible. Given the ways in which art in public spaces seeks to hail the public, this presentation examines how formations of settler subjectivity and Indigenous resurgence are constituted by interpellation’s intersensory address.
About Dylan Robinson
Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah First Nation) scholar whose work seeks to prioritize Indigenous resurgence through writing, curation and arts practice. He is the author of Hungry Listening: Resurgent Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, which won several awards including the Wallace Berry award for Music Theory and the best book award for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. His recent work includes a documentary film on the appropriation of Indigenous song and misrepresentation of Indigenous culture in Canadian classical music, and work in the journal American Anthropologist focused on the museum’s incarceration of Indigenous life.