Tony Cokes, The Queen is Dead, Part 2, 2019. Courtesy the artist, Greene Naftali, New York and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles.
Policing Blackness: Music and Visual Culture
Participants: Dr Monique Charles, Gaika, Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Dr Anamik Saha, Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar.
Speakers from across the fields of art, journalism and academia, joined moderator Dr Anamik Saha for an event combining discussion and listening. Participants traced the Black British experience through music, asking how sound can be a form of resistance to hegemonic forces of dominant cultures, and if commercialism absorbs those energies. In response to recent police action to shut down Drill performances in London, the evening also examined how and why these musical practices are policed and contained. The event featured a new performance by Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Practicing listening to the subterranean murmurs. Policing Blackness: Music and Visual Culture, framed by Goldsmiths CCA’s current exhibition by Tony Cokes, whose work explores the nature of music under capitalism.
Co-organised with Dr Anamik Saha (Senior Lecturer and Co-Convenor of MA Race, Media and Social Justice, Goldsmiths)
BIOGRAPHIES
Dr Monique Charles is a Cultural Sociologist, Theorist and Methodologist. She has developed a research method to analyse and understand music for the social science and cultural studies fields. She completed her PhD at Warwick University focusing on ‘race’, spirituality, class, gender & music as it relates to Grime. It combined interests in music, spirituality, sociology and the African Diaspora (i.e. Black people in Europe and North America). Her approach to sociology is shaped by academic training in political science (when approaching policy, legislation, art or cultural production), cultural studies and psychology (when approaching the psychological and cultural impacts of race). She primarily explore the lives, experiences and cultural productions of the African Diaspora generally and Britain specifically.
Gaika is a multidisciplinary recording and visual artist, working across genres and platforms to create compelling audiovisual experiences. The technically complex worlds Gaika creates merge the futuristic with contemporary culture, with his 2016 debut mixtape Blasphemer shifting the paradigms of what it means to be a black musician in Britain today.
Last Yearz Interesting Negro is the performance project of London based artist/dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. Their practice is always relational, moving across spaces, contexts, roles and collaborations to open up spaces within spaces, for movement and reflection. Resultant choreographies are atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning; stagespace/dreamscape/battleground, working through questions of entanglement, alienation and sensation.
Anamik Saha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, and co-convenor of MA Race, Media and Social Justice. After completing his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, Anamik worked in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds, firstly as an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, then as a Lecturer in Communications. He has held visiting fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Trinity College, Connecticut. Anamik’s research interests are in race and the media, with a particular focus on cultural production and the cultural industries in relation to broader issues of commodification and racial capitalism.
Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. The research he undertakes covers theorizations of black diasporic sonic culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the question of form in the black radical tradition, and the politics of black critical thought. He has published in journals such as Social Text, Darkmatter and Cesura // Acceso and is a founding member of the London based Black Study Group. At present he is working on a book manuscript analysing electronic dance music, urban geography and sonic culture in the contemporary black diaspora of the Global North. He has previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at University of Pennsylvania and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.
Participants: Dr Monique Charles, Gaika, Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Dr Anamik Saha, Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar.
Speakers from across the fields of art, journalism and academia, joined moderator Dr Anamik Saha for an event combining discussion and listening. Participants traced the Black British experience through music, asking how sound can be a form of resistance to hegemonic forces of dominant cultures, and if commercialism absorbs those energies. In response to recent police action to shut down Drill performances in London, the evening also examined how and why these musical practices are policed and contained. The event featured a new performance by Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Practicing listening to the subterranean murmurs. Policing Blackness: Music and Visual Culture, framed by Goldsmiths CCA’s current exhibition by Tony Cokes, whose work explores the nature of music under capitalism.
Co-organised with Dr Anamik Saha (Senior Lecturer and Co-Convenor of MA Race, Media and Social Justice, Goldsmiths)
BIOGRAPHIES
Dr Monique Charles is a Cultural Sociologist, Theorist and Methodologist. She has developed a research method to analyse and understand music for the social science and cultural studies fields. She completed her PhD at Warwick University focusing on ‘race’, spirituality, class, gender & music as it relates to Grime. It combined interests in music, spirituality, sociology and the African Diaspora (i.e. Black people in Europe and North America). Her approach to sociology is shaped by academic training in political science (when approaching policy, legislation, art or cultural production), cultural studies and psychology (when approaching the psychological and cultural impacts of race). She primarily explore the lives, experiences and cultural productions of the African Diaspora generally and Britain specifically.
Gaika is a multidisciplinary recording and visual artist, working across genres and platforms to create compelling audiovisual experiences. The technically complex worlds Gaika creates merge the futuristic with contemporary culture, with his 2016 debut mixtape Blasphemer shifting the paradigms of what it means to be a black musician in Britain today.
Last Yearz Interesting Negro is the performance project of London based artist/dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. Their practice is always relational, moving across spaces, contexts, roles and collaborations to open up spaces within spaces, for movement and reflection. Resultant choreographies are atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning; stagespace/dreamscape/battleground, working through questions of entanglement, alienation and sensation.
Anamik Saha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, and co-convenor of MA Race, Media and Social Justice. After completing his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, Anamik worked in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds, firstly as an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, then as a Lecturer in Communications. He has held visiting fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Trinity College, Connecticut. Anamik’s research interests are in race and the media, with a particular focus on cultural production and the cultural industries in relation to broader issues of commodification and racial capitalism.
Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. The research he undertakes covers theorizations of black diasporic sonic culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the question of form in the black radical tradition, and the politics of black critical thought. He has published in journals such as Social Text, Darkmatter and Cesura // Acceso and is a founding member of the London based Black Study Group. At present he is working on a book manuscript analysing electronic dance music, urban geography and sonic culture in the contemporary black diaspora of the Global North. He has previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at University of Pennsylvania and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.
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