Sounding Black Worlds

My project investigates black archives of Atlantic worlds as praxis and method, with a particular focus on sonic aspects. In foregrounding the black sonic, I seek to expand narrow confines of the black intellectual tradition, which conventionally laud epistemologies that edify education, metropole cultures, travel, and internationalist or pan-African collaboration. This has unintentionally eclipsed and erased other forms of epistemologies that have played a vital role in the black radical traditions. My intervention in this regard is the sonic in its variegated iterations, from the oral and ngoma traditions, to mbaqanga and jazz, speeches and performances, and forms of gathering as practices of community-making, without which community organizing and mass movements would be impossible. The black sonic generatively subverts the supremacy of print press and literacy as privileged sources of legitimate knowledge. By extension the black sonic throws into question received value systems around what constitutes knowledge within academia, assumptions around which bodies and beings can produce knowledge, and the lenses and senses through which we perceive what is radical, what is political, and what is world-making.