Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services
Duke University Press
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
Sounds of Black Switzerland
Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
Writing as a scholar, composer, and musician, Jessie Cox foregrounds the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music in his first book, Sounds of Black Switzerland. Cox, himself Black Swiss, affirms the value of Black life through sound while critiquing anti-Blackness as a cause of erasure, silence, and limitation. He examines Swiss Nigerian composer Charles Uzor’s pieces for George Floyd, work by Black Swiss musicians such as DJ Maïté Chénière, clarinetist Jérémie Jolo, and rapper Nativ, as well as his own musical collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. In these analyses, Cox tackles the particularities of anti-Blackness in Switzerland, creating a practice of listening beyond what can be directly heard to explore the radical potential of Black thought and experience in a nation often claimed to be race-free. In so doing, he ultimately shifts thinking about Blackness in relation to citizenship, immigration laws, gender, kinship, and belonging. By listening to Black Swiss and other voices inaudible to the current world, Cox theorizes new ways of practicing scholarly study and general ways of relating to others and the world.
Author / Editor information
Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University.
Reviews
“Interspersing interstitial events of detailed listening with theoretical formulations derived from that listening, Jessie Cox teaches us about the specificities and varieties of Black life in Switzerland. He notes the fateful and fatal commonalities, particularly those that concern not just the problematic of identity but also the various forms of resistant survival that are given as refusals to identity. An extraordinary provocation and inspiration, Sounds of Black Switzerland prompts ecstatic responses and overwhelming questions.”
-- Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur
-- Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur
“Jessie Cox crucially notes the importance of musical discourses, interdisciplinary modes of knowledge production, and storytelling for the communal ontologies of Black life in diaspora in Switzerland and beyond. He takes aspects habitually overlooked by mainstream knowledges and transforms them into Black diasporic critical instruments. Redrawing the critical maps of the relationship between contemporary Black Switzerland and sonic performance, this lucidly argued, theoretically sophisticated, and timely book will make an immediate contribution to Black diaspora studies, European studies, sound studies, and cultural studies.”
-- Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, author of Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
-- Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, author of Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology
"The book’s strength lies in Cox’s ability to synthesise ideas from across the humanities and social sciences to posit an articulation of Blackness, specifically Swiss Blackness, that exists in' excess of what we might know or think life to be.' . . . This book will appeal to those interested in philosophical meditations on the relationship between sound, race, citizenship, and border thinking."
-- Rose Campion Ethnic and Racial Studies
-- Rose Campion Ethnic and Racial Studies
"[B]eyond advocating for recognition of Black music makers within the nation’s geospatial borders, in this wonder-full book, Cox’s project is more ontological, pointedly political, and broadly metaphysical. Ultimately, this is a book about listening; and specifically listening to the excess affordances of an inaudible Blackness ... within the Swiss context."
-- Anthony Kwame Harrison Popular Music History
-- Anthony Kwame Harrison Popular Music History
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
v -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Acknowledgments
vii -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Introduction: Black Swiss
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1 Interstitial Listenings I Charles Uzor’s Bodycam Exhibit 3, Part I
17 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
2 Blackness and Black Lives in Switzerland
33 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
3 Interstitial Listenings II Blurring the Hold
59 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
4 Afrofuturist Archeology: Citizenship and the Delimitation of Life with Death
71 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
5 Interstitial Listenings III Black Music behind the Wormhole
91 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
6 Mothership Connections
101 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
7 Interstitial Listenings IV 8′46″ George Floyd in Memoriam and White Gaze II Black Square
121 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
8 Listening with Black Switzerland
137 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
9 Interstitial Listenings V Charles Uzor’s Bodycam Exhibit 3, Part II
159 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
10 Black Life / Schwarz-Sein
167 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Conclusion Alongside a Chorus of Voices
187 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Postface Endless Endlessness
197 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
203 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Bibliography
225 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
243
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 24, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478060420
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478060420
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
