How black electronic dance music makes it possible to reorganize life
within the contemporary city.
Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music
produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the
contemporary racialization of the urban--ecologies that can never simply
be reduced to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar
makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge
aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class
character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary
city.
Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the
Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer
Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically
acclaimed musical projects experiment with aesthetic form through an
experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means,
Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12
records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to
make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized
spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life.
Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of
blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions,
Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski rethinks these concepts through concrete
examples of contemporary black electronic dance music production that
allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress
have--through their experiments in blackness--generated genuine
alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial
capitalism.
