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

by Joe Jackson, Carol Vernallis (Editor), Lisa Perrott (Editor), Holly Rogers (Editor)

Overview

"It's wonderful to read a book that ranges across music, cinema, music video art, and literature with such ease… One of the beautiful things about this book is that it is really attentive to relationships, and this is particularly clear when talking about Kahlil Joseph's creative mentors and comrades, including Arthur Jafa and Terrence Malick." -Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Helen S. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry; Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University, USA

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 selected as runner up for Best First Monograph 2025 by BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765103159
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/08/2024
Series:	New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

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.

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.

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).

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”..

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Foreword by Clive Chijioke Nwonka
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The Early Works of Kahlil Joseph
3. Webs of Expression
4. Exhibiting Resilience
5. Sights and Sounds Across the Sea
6. The Contemporary Audiovisual Atlantic
7. Conclusion(s) and Crosscurrents
Bibliography
Mediography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The first of its kind, this book offers unique and concentrated insight into Kahlil Joseph's oeuvre. It takes seriously the role of black popular culture and the complex space that creators like Joseph occupy in the global capitalist imaginary.” —Nedine Moonsamy, Associate Professor of English, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and editor of The Thinker: A Pan-African Quarterly for Thought Leaders

“This is a book that powerfully explores the creative work of Kahlil Joseph through an audiovisual Black Atlantic lens. This allows the writing to use a significant artistic figure to both decolonize our understanding of Blackness and Black identity, and to create a rhizomic map that newly and uniquely connects and articulates the threads of Black (art) history across time, space and cultural trajectories and legacies. The intervention, to show how sound is as essential as seeing, to demonstrate how audio carries identities on the images they are wedded to, is beautifully conceived, argued, and illustrated. A pleasure and privilege to read, think, and feel on.” —Sean Redmond, Professor of Film and Television, Deakin University, Australia, and author of Liquid Space: Science Film and Television in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2017)

“If you want to make sense of contemporary Black cultural production, this is a must-read book. A moving, revolutionary, and multi-modal reading experience at the crossroads of black cultural studies, race, and media studies. Joe Jackson offers the very first in-depth study of award-winning filmmaker Kahlil Joseph's subversive creative work with remarkable rigour, care, and radical engagement, leading to the theorisation of the audiovisual Atlantic. Words that become sound, images, and feelings, which affectively challenge the “white racial frame” in today's understandings of modernity.” —Estrella Sendra, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Education (Events and Festivals), King's College London, UK

“Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic illuminates the transmedia and bold diasporic stylings of Kahlil Joseph's audio-visual artworks in all of their perplexing, and sometimes contradictory, glory. Jackson eruditely positions Kahlil's offerings at the nexus of Africa, America and Europe and at the intersection of art and capital in a way that holds a mirror up to the digitized neoliberal era we live in today. Jackson never loses sight of the humanism and cultural pluralism that underpins Kahlil Joseph's films, music videos and commercials and in so doing, manages to foreground this same humanism and pluralism in his writing, making for an incredibly insightful read.” —Michael W. Thomas, Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK, and author of Popular Ethiopian Cinema: Love and other Genres (Bloomsbury, 2022)

“Joe Jackson has succeeded in capturing the richness of Kahlil Joseph's multifaceted creative journey by situating it within the broader context of his time. He transforms it into an epic where interests and ideals collide. Definitely a thought-provoking text.” —Karine Barclais, Founder, Pavillon Afriques at Cannes Film Festival – Marché du Film

“Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic understands that we live in a digital era where media businesses are becoming increasingly entangled. Written in an accessible style, the book offers promising new perspectives on the global film, music video and advertising industries. A useful read for producers and practitioners as well as university audiences who want to learn more about international production today.” —Jean-Frédéric Garcia, Managing Director, The Location Guide

From the Publisher