Sonic Fiction

Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound. Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction.
In 1998 music critic, DJ and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed this concept in his book "More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction". Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. His argument, his narrations and his explorative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell.
This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and political theory. Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.

Holger Schulze is Professor in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen. His many authored works include Sonic Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020) and The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (Bloomsbury, 2021) and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is co-editor of the journal, Paragrana.

Extradition: What Is Sonic Fiction?
A Force of Liberation
Enforced Landianisms
More Like a Group of Otoliths
1. Sonic Thinking: A Mixillogic MythScience of Mutantextures
The Mythscience of Sonic Warfare
The Mixillogics of Sonic Epistemologies
The Mutantextures of Sonic Possible Worlds
What Is Sonic Thinking?
2. Social Progress: Sensibilities of the Implex
Dath's Mixillogics
The Dialectics of the Implex
Valéry's Sensibilities
Even Wrong Ideas Can Be Made True
3. Black Aurality: Alien Sonic Nontologies
Black Aurality
The Diffraction of Mythscience
Alter Nation, AlterDestiny & Autohistoria
Decolontologies
4. Sensory Epistemologies: Syrrhesis and Sensibility
The Body of the Researcher
Syrrhesis Fiction
Beyond the Idiosyncrasy of Logocentrism
Multiplying Epistemologies
5. Acid Communism: A Haunted Utopia of Sound
Anticipation and Compulsion
Ghosts of Our Times
Theories That Are Embodied
Acid Communism
6. NON: Ultrablack Resistance
Ultrablackness
NON
Rhythmight
Ultrablack Resistance
Inconclusion: Six Heuristics for Critique and Activism
Sonic Fiction as Activism
Sonic Fiction as Critique
Heuristics of the Sonic
Notes
References
Index