Tag Archives: music

Critical Race Studies and Global Englishes, Life writing, Creative writing and Performance, Long Read

An Interview with Anthony Joseph: Afrofuturism, Black Surrealism, Sonic Revolution

By Samridhi Aggarwal, Esther de Bruijn and Anthony Joseph

The following interview with Anthony Joseph was conducted by Samridhi Aggarwal (Joint PhD Scholar with the National University of Singapore) on 5 December, 2022 in a seminar for the module Afrofuturism.[1]

The conversation covers several topics, which we’ve divided into sections for those who’d like to dip in and collect gems of insights on Afrofuturism, black surrealism, black stealth, the revolutionary force of music, and practicing writing into being. Anthony talks about his album The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives (2021) and his novel The African Origins of UFOs (2006), and we’ve reproduced the excerpts of the novel that he read on the day. Continue reading An Interview with Anthony Joseph: Afrofuturism, Black Surrealism, Sonic Revolution →

Aesthetics, Philosophy, Theory, Performance Research Group

On the virtues of slow scholarship and small numbers

By Kélina Gotman, Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies

It is mid-July. The vote for Brexit has happened, leaving many stunned into silence or shocked into outrage, or a combination of both. We haven’t managed to advertise extensively for the smooth & striated: form event and consider cancelling. Then reconsider. It will be strong – perhaps strongest – in small numbers, with a focused few. To do it now means to allow ourselves the luxury (is it a luxury?) of … for lack of a better term … going with the flow, thinking on our feet. Improvising. And that’s also what it is about: ways to think together in a space, on our feet, drawing; to read, transversally, to cut across a couple of texts and discover resonances and recombinations, to think laterally, perhaps.

We have decided for this event to focus on two key texts in twentieth-century art and philosophy, and to rethink not only their critical genealogies (the way Pierre Boulez’s work on pulsed and non-pulsed time, in “Time, Notation, Coding” in particular informs Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s arguably far wider-reaching and still inestimably influential chapter, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” from Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille Plateaux), but also the way both these complex works trouble ways of thinking linearity, teleology and what seems to be an overwhelming preference for the rhizomatic in contemporary art, including particularly in music and dance.

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20th - 21st Centuries, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Theory

Prize-winning responses to modernism

By Helen Saunders, PhD student

In 2013, the King’s Centre for Modern Literature and Culture  (CMLC) was founded and launched its annual prize for Creative Responses to Modernism. Since then, postgraduate students working in modernist studies have been invited to submit their responses to modernism and its artistic explosions in whatever art form seems most appropriate. For some entrants, these have been homages, pastiches or parodies; submissions have both continued and challenged the modernist project. The centre and prize are run by Dr Lara Feigel and Professor Erica Carter.

Continue reading Prize-winning responses to modernism →