Pamela Klassen skillfully leads readers to consider important underlying and interconnected concerns throughout The Story of Radio Mind, including occasions of church-state cooperation in Canada, Ojibwe medicinal and burial practices, Ts’msyen and Nisga’a storytelling conventions, land theft and sovereignty claims, intra-Anglican institutional competition, railway building, Indigenous residential schools, trends in psychical research, and the colonial origins of canonical works in academic anthropology. Moreover, readers learn here—in core chapters on photography, map-making, printing presses, and radio—about the ways in which different technologies mediated the spiritual aspirations and effects of Dominion itself, or, as Klassen puts it, how they “were at the heart of the negotiations and contests that made possible the invention of the new Canadian nation.” Operating in multiple registers—and with recurring attention to Klassen’s personal investments in matters of research design and narrative method—The Story of Radio Mind encourages deep reflection on the interdependent relationship between margins and metropoles in North American history and historiography, and it calls scholars to account both for previous failings and future possibilities of self-reflexive storytelling at the intersection of religious studies, Indigenous studies, and media studies.
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In the spirit of reconciliation
by
Miranda Johnson
Pamela Klassen offers her subtle and judicious book to us “in the spirit” of the call issued in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report in Canada. Established in 2008 to examine the effects of the Indian Residential Schools, the commission elicited over six thousand testimonies from across the country and mainly from residential school survivors. These survivors, as Klassen poignantly observes, were removed from parents, grandparents, and the elders who might otherwise have told them the stories that held them together as peoples. The commission judged the school system to be a systematic attempt at “cultural genocide.” This is a strong condemnation, especially from a state-sponsored body. The implications of the charge, and the call for action the report issued, have been taken seriously by state and civil institutions in Canada. However, attention has primarily focused on the victims and survivors of the schools, with less attention paid to agents of colonialism, presumably because many of the leading figures are already well represented in Canadian national history. Nonetheless, the relative absence of those voices marks the Canadian TRC as distinct from the South African version, which did consider the stories of perpetrators. In the Canadian context, The Story of Radio Mind flips the script, offering us a dialogic history of settler colonialism.
Openings and flashes: A reply to Shelton and Sornito
by
Susan Lepselter
Here are two intensely original essays in distinct voices and registers that also repeatedly intersect. Reading Christina Sornito and Allen Shelton together gave me an impression of waves: shifting overlaps of Walter Benjamin and Carl Jung, openings and flashes, Trump and nostalgia. Both Sornito and Shelton use theory shot through with stories, and stories with theory. Both leave me with a jolt of open intellectual possibility. Together, these essays animate questions I wanted to think with in The Resonance of Unseen Things. How do fragments of social memory saturate stories which, at least on the surface, refer not to history but to the occult, the fantastic, the ephemeral real? How do we encounter affect in the recombinations and repetitions of poetics? (Shelton rightly observes that The Resonance of Unseen Things was opened ethnographically in the “stylistic explosion” of Katie Stewart’s Ordinary Affects, which performed, as Shelton puts it, “the sense that affect is a wavelength running through terrains.”)
Modern flashiness: A method
by
Christina Verano Sornito
Of her informants from the Hillview UFO Experiencers group to the Little A’Le’Inn, Lepselter writes, “[Y]ou don’t need a Christian paradigm (nor any explicit ideology). . . . You need a specific orientation toward power, an inchoate sense of your own distance from its invisible source.” From hundreds of students converging in my course on magic in 2018, I sense a similarly obscured and multiply fractured orientation to power. It resonates between people, and among anonymous hostile entities. Familiar social categories and modes of causation cannot define and control the world around them. Myth, magic, fantasy video games, internet meme wars, and the resurgence of witchcraft are both “impractical” to a thoroughly neoliberalized economy, and yet vital and flashy in the everyday worlds of 2018 trembling with portent. Eco-cide, “fake news,” wildfires, political intrigue, and the list goes on.
Open Sky (after Paul Virilio)
by
Allen Shelton
After Trump was elected president it felt like the sky had turned to iron with nothing but smudgy glass portals set in intervals through which I could even catch a glimpse of blue or the stars. It was like looking through the eyes of the long dead German exile Walter Benjamin who in the 1930s was obsessed with the Paris arcades. Was his fascination with these structures like mine a melancholia about the coming future; even dreams had a ceiling here while around and inside these greenhouses fascism was flourishing. He could at least walk out of these structures; I can’t. I read Susan Lepselter’s book soon after the election for the first time, then a second, and up to five times by now in part because in her book the sky is still open, filled with stars. It gives me hope. The sky hasn’t turned to iron yet. Where Benjamin retreated in his arcades to the point of virtual disappearance, Lepselter’s writing coalesces around the reader. She turns ethnography into poetics.