Sonic Intimacy: Reggae Sound Systems, Jungle Pirate Radio and Grime YouTube Music Videos

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Description

Sonic intimacy is a key concept through which sound, human and technological relations can be assessed in relation to racial capitalism. What is sonic intimacy, how is it changing and what is at stake in its transformation, are questions that should concern us all. Through an analysis of alternative music cultures of the Black Atlantic (reggae sound systems, jungle pirate radio and grime YouTube music videos), Malcolm James critically shows how sonic intimacy pertains to modernitys social, psychic, spatial and temporal movements. This book explores what is urgently at stake in the development of sonic intimacy for human relations and alternative black and anti-capitalist public politics.

Reviews

For a world too often rupturing the basic intimacies of social life, James meticulously details the operations of sonic life support systems for Black Britaina constant remaking of getting down below the propulsions of racial capitalism through deploying vibes, hypes and grimes as the medium through which black wisdom, wholeness, craft and mutuality are sutured into the sound of collective breath. * AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK *
In Sonic Intimacy, Malcolm James reads the infrastructures, mechanics, and geographies of sound to theorize black sonics as sites of relation, conjuncture, impermanence, and diaspora. Here, bass-mediated vibes and deep jungle grooves interrupt normative governmentalities while sound systems, digital transactions, mobile recordings, and video-shares are rendered sites of creative innovation. In pairing sonic intimacies with technologies of expression, James draws attention to the way black cultural texts work across, and subvert and unsettle, market time-space. I admire the affective-political waveforms moving through this text. * Katherine McKittrick, Professor of Gender Studies, Queens University, Canada *
This is a relentlessly thoughtful and intelligent historical survey of how the role of music in black life has been transformed technologically, ethically and politically. Malcolm James provocative and probing analysis sets a new standard for future work on sound, space and the politics of race. * Paul Gilroy, Professor of Humanities, University College London, UK *
Sonic Intimacy is an extraordinary exploration of the intricate relationships between sound, space and sociality. It charts a crucial but wholly under-explored slice of our recent cultural history with theoretical acuity and political sensitivity; making a significant contribution to the study of music culture in general, to contemporary cultural studies and to the genealogy of the sound system assemblage in particular. * Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London, UK *

Author Bio

Malcolm James is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.