Diaspora as Translation and Decolonisation

For the social scientist – if identities are constituted and negotiated, and other cultures are always in hybridization – then centering discussions of diaspora-and-hybridity doesn’t take us as far as I’d like to go.

Ipek Demir, 2022

I think we need to challenge north-centric understandings of migration diaspora, and also ethnic diversity, because these north-centric approaches, they are often unable to see others, for example the colonized or racialized diasporas as sources of ideas and concepts. They fail to recognize that racialized diasporas in the global north, through their struggles, have actually conceptually and practically expanded ideas about equality and freedom.

Ipek Demir, 2022

Hip-Hop Epistemology

This video is from a Q&A with P. Khalil Saucier from the conference Hip-Hop Transcultural: Constructing and Contesting Identity, Space, and Place in the Americas and beyond (2021). After his Keynote entitled: TransCultural Flow and the Problem of the Cipher. I asked the following question:

Do you (or others) see anything constructive in viewing Hip-Hop as an epistemological invention, then, as the bridge between ontology and the lived and practiced experience? I’m not sure where that takes us, but have you or others worked on such framing before?

The answer is yes, but…

Bedroom Beethovens

Bedroom Beethovens
A podcast exploring what makes an amazing producer. Is it their technical know-how, or their innate musicianship? Is it an ear for a hit or a knack for the commercial? We will celebrate, above all, the challenges and setbacks that ultimately lead to growth and betterment and we figure out hour 1 of the 10,000 hour journey.

Hear stories from notable music-makers on what they sacrificed to create the music you love.

– Bedroom Beethovens

The Conflict of the Faculties

At first glance we seem to be dealing with a double circle: that which is to be proved is already assumed, and we test our assumptions in implementing them. In actual fact, however, this is not self-referential at all; it is a dynamic chain of interactions, transformations, and articulations that may ultimately produce more reality.

Henk Borgdorff, 2012

An Alternate History of the World’s Music

Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.

Garth Cartwright

Who Are You Writing For?

INTERVIEWER:
Do you have a reader in your mind when you write?

BALDWIN:
No, you can’t have that.

INTERVIEWER:
So it’s quite unlike preaching?

BALDWIN:
Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

[ James Baldwin, in “The Art of Fiction No. 78”, Paris Review, Issue 91, Spring 1984 ]

Source: Daana Townsend – @retrosoul