Radical Runosong

This book is about land and kin, dispossession and desire, solidarity and silence. It is a critical celebration of the oral tradition of runosong, a style of singing which has been practiced for centuries by Baltic Finnic peoples on the land now called Estonia and elsewhere. Featuring conversations with singers and folklorists Anne Türnpu, Andreas Kalkun, and Janika Oras, the compiled texts enact a fugitive search for historical consciousness by drawing upon the wealth of alternative vocal and somatic practices embedded in runosong. Working against the grain of Estonian nationalism and its Eurocentric tendencies, this involves mapping and resisting the ways in which divergent bodies, selves, and forms of physical sociality have been disci­plined through the interplay of brutality and privilege inherent to modernization. The book is a provocation, but one born out of love and a sense of obligation to the ancestors.