Turntable Epistemologies: Queering Sound System Migrations in the Reagan/Thatcher Era

My project is interdisciplinary and engages performance studies, queer studies, critical ethnography, diaspora and Black feminist cultural studies. I identify three broad theoretical areas that my work intersects with. The first are a set of scholarly debates pertaining to Black diasporic music and sound studies. There has been an important influx of work connecting racial politics to sound and technology (Chude-Sokei 2005; Nelson 2002; Weheliye 2005). These interventions address how Black diasporic music is rendered illegible within white ethno-musicology and sound studies. By honing into sonic embodiment, science fiction, and Afrofuturism, scholars such as Kodwo Eshun (1998) and Edward George (1996) offer a re-imagining of an Afrodiasporic presence. This broadening shows that Black music is not just lived and made, but actually produces distinct imaginaries and worlds that reflect broader debates on who is understood to be human. Julian Henriques' (2011) study of the Jamaican dancehall sound system provides a rigorous ethnographic account and illustrates how these systems operate and resound within an auditory, corporeal and diasporic cultural realm. In building on his scholarship, by following the afterlife of the sound system in the U.S. and in the U.K., I highlight the routes and circulations of sound system culture. My research interrogates larger theoretical debates on how sound can be studied within the context of Black diaspora and technological advancement that decentres western progressive narratives. In mapping the reverberations of sound system culture in Black queer spaces in the U.S. and the U.K., one aim of the work is to understand how queer people received and reformed the sound system.

My second focus area is Black queer studies and performance studies. The project grapples with debates pertaining to the relationship between music and queer studies, how ethnographic studies on sound can be queered, and what Black queer migration looks like. Exploring these threads, I converse with scholarship that brings together race, gender, class, and queer theory (Holland, 2012; Munoz, 1996,1999; E. Patrick Johnson 2001, 2003). My project addresses how we might analyse the fleeting performative ways of Black queerness. As my research remaps how people, ideas, and sound travel, I incorporate existing debates on the connection between queerness and migration. Sound is migratory in nature, which I explore through metaphors such as sound waves and bass frequencies. Here my project takes cues from Omi'seke Natasha Tinsley (2008), who challenges Paul Gilroy's (1993) influential concept of the "Black Atlantic", with a Black queer analysis that enriches who is understood to be part of the "Black Atlantic".

My work moves in the direction of Black American and Black British feminist scholarship (Sharpe, 2006; Hartman, 2019; hooks 1994, 2003; Carby, 1999, 2019; Lewis, 2017) to analyse the gendered socio-political conditions for Black queers, women and migrants in the U.S. and the U.K. I plan to explore the Reagan and Thatcher era and how the policies put in place by both regimes compromised the quality of life for Black queers, women and migrants. Yet, in spite of this hostile climate, Black queers, women and migrants helped to build alternative worlds, spaces and sounds. Noticeably, the contributions of Black women and queers are left out of dominant narratives about sound system culture. My project surveys a different kind of history and timeline by tying in feminist cultural studies (McRobbie, 1999) as an analytical framework. In doing so, I emphasise the importance of drawing connections between Black British cultural studies (Hall, 1983, 1992; Carby 1999, 2019; Gilroy 1993, 2013) and Black American cultural studies (Moten, 2003; Spillers, 2006 Woods, 1998), from a Black queer and feminist perspective.