Black Music and the Historian's Craft

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.