The Word, Sound and Power Research Blog

This is an attempt to think about the “Power” of sound, the power of the word, and  - most importantly - about the power generated at the nexus of word and sound. My meditations draw heavily from the thinking of two brilliant Afro-diasporic artists and intellectuals: the African American musician John Coltrane and the Caribbean poet and critic Kamau Brathwaite. Both figures tell us something important about the rhythmic patterns of music and language, i.e. that they have the power to call-into-being new forms of consciousness. 

The George Padmore Institute (GPI) is a research archive, library and educational resource that holds documents, letters, journals, audio recordings and other historical and cultural records related to communities of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in the UK.

 ^{April 9, 4:30-6 pm, Sophus Bugges Hus, Auditorium 3} 

Listening to Whitney: Revision and Retrieval through Close Reading

Music has long been described as the prime mover of Black culture, the first and most durable of all Afrodiasporic arts. Yet musical meaning is also produced by literary and critical discourse, which has the power to definitively illuminate as well as obfuscate Black artists’ craft, vision, and impact. I suggest that close readings of pop songs performed by women artists, combined with the singers’ own commentary, provide the ground for any serious reevaluation of artists’ lives and work. These readings of neglected sources animate my current biography of Whitney Houston, a singer who has been widely celebrated but rarely studied; lamented but not listened to. They help us to build a new narrative about Houston’s genius and impact—one that overturns the dominant, reductive image of the singer as a pop princess-turned-victim, while also yielding new insights into the nexus of agency and contingency, visibility and invisibility, talent and craft. I suggest in closing that such a reconsideration is made possible by a redistribution of cultural, discursive power that Houston herself helped to advance.

Review of Camille Norment's recent performance at the Munch Museum.

Wendy Lotterman started as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the research project “Word, Sound and Power” this autumn. 

The title of the project “Word, Sound and Power” is a reference to the complex ways Afrodiasporic writers and artists have conceptualised and theorised the relationship between aesthetics and politics.