The Word, Sound and Power Research Blog

Stone Assemblies brings together voices thinking through the politics of stone, ruination, and dissent. The book launch and concert will take place at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo on the 16th of October. 

Lyse Netter is a music festival that will be held for the seventh time on 12–14. June, in Moss, Norway. This year they will host talks and Q&As with some of the musicians playing at the festival in the bookshop and café House of Foundation. I will host some of the Q&As, including a conversation with Colm Ó Cíosóig (My Bloody Valentine).

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is a rare book library and literary archive at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The Langston Hughes Papers are held at the Beinecke. 

Eliza McCarthy (DPhil in English, University of Oxford) is a Guest Researcher on Word, Sound and Power this spring.

The Word, Sound and Power Workshop 2026 will be held at the University of Oslo on the 28th of April. The workshop will take place on the 12th floor or Niels Treschows hus, from 11am to 5pm. All welcome!

My last living grandparent Boyzie Layne died on the 6th of April.

City Rockers was a Norwegian punk fanzine active from 1978 to 1980 that in addition to covering Norwegian and British punk, published articles and essays about reggae releases and reggae gigs in London at the time.

The Oslo-based DJ, musician and writer Tony F Wilson has granted us permission to republish his interview with Britcore and UK Bass music innovator Jon E Cash from 2003. The interview, here with a new intro to mark the release of a Jon E Cash compilation in 2025, was first published in the fanzine Hardcore Is More Than Music.

On Friday, November 28, a Word, Sound and Power symposium was convened at Christ Church as part of Wendy Lotterman’s visiting research fellowship at the University of Oxford. Speakers included: Gabriel Bristow, James Goodwin, Danny Hayward, Louisa Layne, Eliza McCarthy, Francis Gooding, Akshi Singh, and a keynote by Dhanveer Brar.

Anne Walmsley (1931–12. July, 2025) wrote the pioneering study The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History

This summer we will be reading The Lonely Londoners (1956) by Samuel Selvon together.

WSP speaks to Norway's quarterly jazz magazine about the Harlem Renaissance as past, present and future

In The Break

This year's guest lecture will be given by Kodwo Eshun. It will take place in Oxford on 2. April. 

Please join us for an evening of poetry, ideas, conversation, and music in a new and historically unique space in Storgata 36C.

20. November, 6 pm. 

Wendy Lotterman (poetry reading)

Priya Bains (poetry reading)

Louisa Olufsen Layne (essay)

Chair: Bruce Barnhart

Sweet Talking DJs (Adrian Eidem and Louisa Olufsen Layne)

The first text our new reading group will read is the essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (1990) by Stuart Hall. 

Beverly Glenn-Copeland announces his final tour.

A review of "Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music" at the British Library

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.