Supersonic Insurgencies: Black Music, Movements and Methods

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Description for Program

This roundtable Supersonic Insurgencies is centered on three broad ideas: What were the relationships between Black global radicalism and musical traditions like Reggae, Hip-Hop, and Dancehall in the long 1980/90s? How can Black Studies use music as radical theory, archive, and method to explore Black internationalism in this era? What do Black soundscapes tell us about the inherent radicalism in Black internationalism? Each roundtable participant will broadly speak to how their forthcoming projects speaks to these questions. Amanda Joyce Hall’s (University of California, Santa Barbara) study of the shantytown solidarities that frames the global dynamics of Black Consciousness and South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Movement includes explorations of Reggae and anti-apartheid. Similarly, Robert Trent Vinson (University of Virginia) engages Hip-Hop, Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation as a movement that had international dimensions in South Africa. Kimberly Monroe’s (Trinity Washington University) project on the radical Black womanhood of Assata Shakur and Black underground fugivity spans Hip-Hop. Quito J. Swan’s uses the insurgent soundscapes of Dancehall music as an archive of Black radical responses to an international carceral state of surveillance and exploitation.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Leslie Alexander

Presenters

• Quito Swan

• Robert Trent Vinson

• Amanda Joyce Hall, UC Santa Barbara

• Kimberly F. Monroe, Trinity Washington University