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The Sojourner Project / South Africa • Frequencies of Blackness: A Listening Session

Frequencies of Blackness: A Listening Session
Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru & Alexander Weheliye

Join us in a space where we will listen and learn, screen and spin, talk and reflect.

November 20th 2020 | 7pm (SAST) / 12pm (EST)

What does frequency offer us as a framework for understanding black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-blackness? And how might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of black life’s irrepressible drive toward creating a different kind of futurity?

At a moment of transnational racial reckoning, this listening session explores black frequency as a site of possibility. It engages black frequency in multiple forms: as a sonic space that ranges from silence to deafening, dissonant noise; as a register of ecstatic rapture and spirituality; as a temporal feedback loop of memory, repetition, and renewal; as a dynamic relation of call and response, or chorus and verse; as a haptic and kinetic space of contact and connection across the African continent and its various diasporas.

Frequencies of Blackness is an invitation to explore black frequency through dialogue on sight, sound, memory, movement, and connection. The conveners of the session, Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru and Alexander Weheliye, have assembled a collection of sonic and haptic, written and visual texts that enact black frequency in a multitude of ways.

Hosted by the Black Visualities Initiative of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and presented collaboratively with The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg and Art for Humanity at Durban University of Technology, with the support of the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM).

Nov 20, 2020 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)