BLACK-HISTORY MONTH SEMINAR SERIES*

‘CORNER POLITICS: THE INTERSECTIONAL AND CROSS RACIAL SONIC VISIONS OF MILES DAVIS’

By Professor Elliott H. Powell, University of Minnesota.

6.30pm – 8.30 pm on Friday 14 October, 2016 in the Keynes Library (Room 114), Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square. London WC1H

In the summer of 1972, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis released On the Corner, his first jazz fusion studio album that deliberately sought to capture African American political consciousness of the early 1970s. Yet, the album heavily relied upon queer and South Asian cultural signifiers to articulate such political ideologies, two formations that generally sit outside dominant framings of Black political expressions during this period. This talk critically engages On the Corner, and argues that it linked and expressed South Asian sound and alternative sexualities as constitutive formations that animated and expanded notions of Blackness and Black life of the early 1970s.

Prof. Elliott Powell is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work brings together critical race, feminist, and queer theory to consider the political implications of Black popular culture. Writings from these research areas are published or forthcoming in philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, and the “Black Queer and Trans Aesthetics” special issue of The Black Scholar (for which he is a co-editor). Additionally, he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Other Side of Things: African American and South Asian Collaborative Sounds in Black Popular Music, which examines African American and South Asian collaborative music-making practices in U.S.-based jazz, funk, and hip hop since the 1960s.

*The Seminar is convened and chaired by Dr Mpalive Msiska (m.msiska@bbk.ac.uk), Reader in English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom.

ALL WELCOME!