In Radical Traversals, Sierra Edd combines work on Indigenous art practice and production, politics of aesthetics, and temporal sovereignty, to highlight the potentialities of decolonial imagining and interpretative methods of listening in an analysis of the digital music collection called the Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape. Edd examines how sonic affect and the remix form create spatial and temporal multidimensionality or hyper-presence, to disrupt Western orders of objecthood and colonial logics in music. Drawing on epistemological provocations in Native and Indigenous studies, Black diaspora studies, and Sound studies, this paper uses a theoretical framework of traveling Indigeneity to center collaboration and theorizations on decolonial imagination which describes emergent radical envisioning and world-making as a conceptual tool of troubleshooting. To foreground the engagement with Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous sound and aesthetics in music, Edd uses a method of close-listening, a heterogeneous intimacy or a whole-body encounter with sonic (meta)physics and acoustics. This paper illustrates how listening and engaging with the Mixtape’s political aesthetic form encourages decolonial imagining and employs micro-scale resurgence enacted in quotidian intellectual and emotional knowledge building.
