DeForrest Brown Jr: Reading List
ReadingList Posted—January 10, 2022
Black Popular Culture, A Project by Michele Wallace examines the roles of artist and audience, producer and critic, and the synergistic relationship between black cultural expressions and their political, economic, and social contexts. An extraordinary array of critics, scholars, and cultural producers explore the multiple meanings of the cultural term "Black" and, in so doing, propose an inclusive arena of expression and political possibility within the context of black popular culture.
Where Do We Go from Here was Martin Luther King Jr.’s analysis of the state of American race relations and the movement after a decade of U.S. civil rights struggles.
Music writer, theorist and film maker Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction covers the music of artists such as Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Lee Perry, Dr Octagon, Parliament and Underground Resistance. The book was revolutionary for the way Kodwo decoded the messages in jazz, dub, techno, funk, hiphop, jungle and much more in order to create new sonic possibilities and fictions.
Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, Caribbean Studies, American Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism trapped in their respective camps, this bold book sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once; a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also enriches our understanding of modernism.
Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity by Tsitsi Ella Jaji analyses how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential.
