The Black Studies Podcast

In this week's episode, we are joined by Dr. Dhanveer Singh Brar and Dr. Francesca D'Amico-Cuthbert to discuss Black music and the historian's craft.

In a fascinating conversation that discusses music and cultural production across time and space, we reflect on our careful listening and study of Black musicians and cultural industries. We pay special attention to creative artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, Janet Jackson, Mos Def, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Luther Vandross, and how they have shared precious resources to help their audiences step audaciously into the past and imagine more promising and fantastic futures.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a writer, researcher, and teacher focussing on questions of race, culture, aesthetics, politics and theory from the mid-twentieth century to the present. He has published two books, Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit), published by the 87 Press, and Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century, published by Goldsmiths Press. Dhanveer is also a member of two research and performance projects, “Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective” (with Louis Moreno, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Fumi Okiji, Paul Rekret and Ronald Rose-Antoinette) and “Lover's Discourse” (with Edward George).

Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert is a Hip Hop Historian, researcher, consultant and creative. Her research explores the history of Hip Hop culture and Rap music, the creative industries, and histories of anti-Blackness in the music marketplace. Her forthcoming book project, a history of American Hip Hop knowledge production in the era of mass incarceration, outlines how Black rappers constructed complex ethnographies of urban spaces, transformed dispositions of power, and unmasked the modes and mechanisms of a persistent and haunting coloniality in the afterlives of American slavery. Currently, Dr. D’Amico-Cuthbert serves as a researcher on the Fresh, Bold and So Def Hip Hop feminist intervention project, and on the education committee for the Universal Hip Hop Museum (which is set to open in 2024 in the Bronx, New York City).

Transcript

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On this week's episode of the Black Studies Podcast, we are thrilled to be joined by Deborah Thomas and Kamari Maxine Clarke to discuss the case for letting Anthropology burn, what a radically humanist Anthropology might look like, and much more!

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the afterlives of imperialism, in the forms of community, subjectivity and expectation that are produced by violence. She is an award-winning author of books such as Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness. She is also a co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race (2006), co-director and co-producer of the documentary films Bad Friday, and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness, which opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017. From 2016-2020, she was the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished Professor in Transnational Justice and Socio-legal Studies at the University of Toronto and an award-winning author who has published nine books and over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters . For more than twenty years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of race and globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions concerning culture and power and detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems, and In 2021, she received a Guggenheim Prize for career excellence. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a technical advisor to the African Union legal counsel.

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In this special, two-part episode of the Black Studies podcast, we are thrilled to be joined by David Austin and Bryan Mukandi! In part one of their incredibly generous and generative conversation, David and Bryan discuss the revolutionary power of curiosity, intellectual humility and poet-philosophers of the dispossessed such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Zadie Smith, Bob Marley, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and the Sons of Kemet.

David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution and editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness and You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal is the 2014 winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize. His writing engages the work of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Hannah Arendt, Walter Rodney, and Linton Kwesi Johnson in relation to politics, poetry and social movements. A former youth worker and community organizer, he has also produced radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon. He currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College and in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

Bryan Mukandi is an academic philosopher and health humanities researcher, with a background in the practice of medicine in a resource-poor, sub-Saharan African context. His work is directed towards understanding and addressing the social configurations that improve or worsen the well-being of those served least well by society. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Queensland in Australia, and one of his current research projects is Seeing the Black Child, which seeks to expand, reconfigure and present a more complex understanding of childhood than dominant conceptions of childhood in Australia that take the figure of the white child as paradigmatic.

Transcript

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In the season finale of the Black Studies podcast, Gavin "Gavsborg" Blair and Isis Semaj-Hall join us to talk about dub aesthetics and the rhythms, sounds, and music that help them to find new forms of belonging with time, space, and each other.

Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair is co-founder of Equiknoxx Music, a Kingston-based production and performance collective, with Bobby Blackbird. With roots in Reggae, Hip Hop, Jazz, Dancehall & Ska, the group operates across multiple genres while staying Jamaican to the core. Equiknoxx has released music for Aidonia, Busy Signal, Beenie Man, Ky-Mani Marley, Krayzie Bone, Masicka, J.O.E, Shanique Marie among others. While collaborating with Illum Sphere, Swing Ting, Mark Ernestus, Poirier, Arcade Fire and The Dirty Projectors among others, Equiknoxx continues to be revered for sharing new Jamaican expressions with the world and “making dancehall weird again” (Pitchfork magazine).

Dr. Isis Semaj-Hall is the Riddim Writer. She is a literary scholar, decolonial feminist, and cultural analyst with a creative practice that is nurtured by sound. As the Riddim Writer, she creates sound art and hosts the podcast “For Posterity” where she interviews Caribbean writers, musicians, visual artists, and inspiring citizens. As a Caribbean storytelling advocate, she has dubbed poetry and published non-fiction and fiction works. She is also co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine PREE: Caribbean Writing. With a commitment to opening-up access, her cultural analysis and critical scholarship have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, in non-academic outlets, and can be heard on the 2022 Carnegie Hall produced Afrofuturism podcast. She is currently completing her monograph “On the B-Side: Storytelling Meets Caribbean Futurism in Infinite Dub,” a critical exploration of word-sound-power, deep listening, environmental wisdom, and Caribbean identities. Dr. Semaj-Hall is the Caribbean literature and popular culture specialist in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Kingston, Jamaica.

Episode Transcript

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This week we are joined by Anna Jane McIntyre and Angélique Willkie to discuss their playful, gentle, and assertive approaches to activism and art-making.

Anna Jane McIntyre is a British-Trinidadian-now-Canadian multidisciplinary artist who explores Architectures of Being & Breathing through non-compartmentalised-think-light-movement-heavy art forms like printmaking, kinetic sculpture, installation, gifs, costume making, to-do lists, storytelling, story-setting, bushcraft, inaccurate portraiture & dodgy $5 entrepreneurial street sale experiments.

Anna’s draft composition for the "We" mural at the Athletics and Recreation building, Queen's University, can be viewed on her website.

A dance artivist, Angélique Willkie grounds herself in corporeal and decolonial dramaturgies. That work moves her through the structures of Concordia University.

More information about Angélique’s solo performance, Confession Publique, can be found online, as can further details about her role as chair of the President's Task Force on Anti-Black Racism at Concordia.

Songs selected by Angelique and Anna Jane have been added to the Black List, a playlist that compiles songs of sorrow and joy selected by guests on the Black Studies podcast. You can also find more bonus content inspired by our conversations with multidisciplinary artists, activists, curators, musicians, and scholars on Instagram (@blackstudiespodcast) and Linktree (https://linktr.ee/blackstudiespodcast)

Episode transcript

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