2021 University Lecture
Beneath and Beyond Human: Race and Technology Between Singularities
Presented by Louis Chude-Sokei,
Professor of English; George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies; Director, African American Studies Program
March 23, 2022
Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts
Louis Chude-Sokei is a professor of English, the George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies, and director of the African American Studies Program at Boston University. He is a writer and scholar whose books includes the award-winning, The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2006), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) and the acclaimed memoir, Floating in A Most Peculiar Way (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). His public and literary writing has appeared in various national and international venues including, The LA Times, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, The Chicago Quarterly, South Africa’s Chimurenga Chronic and The Daily Gleaner in Jamaica. He is the Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies in the United States.
Chude-Sokei has collaborated with numerous artists, performers, and programmers on projects focused on sound, music, and technology. This includes legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones who is adapting sections of The Sound of Culture for film and performance, and iconic Berlin electronic artists, Mouse on Mars with whom he produced the celebrated album Anarchic Artificial Intelligence (Thrill Jockey Records 2021). Chude-Sokei is also founder of the sonic art/archiving project, Echolocution, and is the lead artist/curator of “Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention,” a year-long sound art experiment in Nuremberg, Germany, focused on Nazi Party historical sites, for which he won the Kulturstiftun Des Bundes Award from the German Federal Cultural Foundation. He is also a curator of Carnegie Hall’s 2022 Afrofuturism Festival.
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