Sounds from the Other Side: AfroSouth Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A sixty-year history of AfroSouth Asian musical collaborations

From Beyoncs South Asian musicinspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltranes use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliotts high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyonc, and others, showing how AfroSouth Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States.

The long historical arc of AfroSouth Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

Reviews

"Elliott H. Powells book is like the music he investigates: intelligent, intimate, and offering new possibilities for intercultural engagement. His analyses transcend appropriation narratives to unearth the nuances of power in AfroSouth Asian exchanges. Importantly, Powell demonstrates the fallacy of placing white, heteronormative paradigms onto people of color and instead illuminates a diverse and innovative history of aesthetic and political collaboration."T. Carlis Roberts, University of California, Berkeley

"Sounds from the Other Side is a crucial intervention in the scholarship of AfroSouth Asian cultural and political connectionsan original, sophisticated, and multi-layered account of African American musicians creative engagements with South Asian musics, musicians, and spiritualties. Elliott H. Powell demonstrates that varied soundings and imaginings of South Asia have provided musicians as divergent as Miles Davis, Rick James, and Beyonc with a terrain for conjuring new forms of radical Black beinga terrain in which Blackness, South Asianness, queerness, and liberatory politics are articulated together and coconstituted."Vivek Bald, author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Author Bio

Elliott H. Powell is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.