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Book Cover for: Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art, Joe Jackson

Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art

Joe Jackson

Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style - which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music - challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle.

This is the first book-length study of Kahlil Joseph's work. Distinguishing the artist's personal and professional personas, it traces Joseph's career trajectory and artistic output, emphasizing how the director's construction of a multifaceted filmmaking persona operates in tandem with his artworks to challenge fixed, unidimensional or stable notions of identity.

Through biographical study and deep examinations of the director's respective transmedia artworks, this book draws from various discussions shaped by Paul Gilroy's ground-breaking text The Black Atlantic (1993). By applying The Black Atlantic's disruptive audiocentric ideas to contemporary digital media forms generated by Kahlil Joseph and his peers alike, this book challenges the latent Eurocentricity on which dominant theorizations of 'modernity' - as well as the overlapping fields of Film, Media and Screen Studies - are grounded. In turn, it offers an alternative framework for negotiating the paradoxes, contradictions and transnational flows of our media-saturated present: namely, the Audiovisual Atlantic.

This book has been shortlisted for Best First Monograph 2025 by BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies).

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: Aug 8th, 2024
  • Pages: 248
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.63in - 1.11lb
  • EAN: 9798765103166
  • Categories: Individual Composer & MusicianBlack Studies (Global)Media Studies

About the Author

Jackson, Joe: - Joe Jackson is Lecturer in Communications & Media (Multimedia Production) at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. He studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies (PhD, MA) and University College London (BA). He is a member of the Screen Worlds collective, wrote about global media production as Web Editor for The Location Guide, and previously created educational resources at the Institution of Civil Engineers. This is his first book.
Vernallis, Carol: - Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Perrott, Lisa: - Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is co-editor, with Holly Rogers and Carol Vernallis, of the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media, and the collected volume Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Lisa is also co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom. Her interests include music video, animation, documentary and transmedia, with an emphasis on the relations between sound, music and visual media. Lisa is currently completing her second Bloomsbury monograph David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video (1984-2016 and Beyond).
Rogers, Holly: - Holly Rogers is Professor of Music and Director of Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where she runs the MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures). She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and co-author of Studying Twentieth-Century Music in the West (2022). She has edited several books on audiovisual culture, including Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017), Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2019), Cybermedia (Bloomsbury, 2021), YouTube and Music (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Remediating Sound (Bloomsbury, 2023). Holly is one of the founding editors for Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media and the Goldsmiths journal "Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture"..