Book Launch: Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic (2024)

Free and open to all.

The Digital Cultures and Economies Research Hub and Sonic Screen Lab at LCC, UAL are excited to present this launch event for Joe Jackson's new book – Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art (2024) – in collaboration with SOAS’s Screen Worlds project and CCIMSS: Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies.

This is the first book-length study to: firstly, examine the works of multi-awarding winning director Kahlil Joseph; and secondly, propose the Audiovisual Atlantic as a framework for negotiating the transnational movements of contemporary music videos and other forms of music-imbued digital media.

The event will take place from 6 – 7:30pm in Lecture Theatre A (LTA) on Thursday 30 January. After welcoming notes from Steve Cross, Dean of the Media School, a presentation by Joe will be followed by firstly a roundtable discussion – chaired by Lindiwe Dovey (SOAS); with guest speakers Clive Chijioke Nwonka (UCL) and Ashwani Sharma (LCC, UAL) – and secondly an audience Q+A session.

Guests are then invited to an informal food and drinks reception in the Dark Room Bar (near LTA) after the event, where physical copies of the book will be available to purchase.

This event is free but registration via Eventbrite is required.

Roundtable: Speaker Bios

Dr Joe Jackson is Lecturer in Communications & Media (Multimedia Production) at LCC, UAL. His debut book – Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art (2024) – is out now with Bloomsbury Academic. He is working on a second book on audiovisual representations of austerity in contemporary Britain. You can find out more about Joe’s work at: josephowenjackson.com

Lindiwe Dovey is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at SOAS. She is a researcher, teacher, filmmaker, and film curator, and her work aims to combine film scholarship and practice in mutually enlightening ways. From 2019 to 2025, she is the Principal Investigator of the project ’African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies,’ which is funded by a European Research Council grant.

Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society within UCL’s Faculty of the Arts and Humanities, and a Faculty Associate of the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Nwonka’s scholarship broadly centres on race and the humanities. His research is focused on the study of Black film, culture and identity. He is the co-editor of the book Black Film/British Cinema II (2021), the author of the book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film (2023), which was longlisted for the 2024 Krazna Krausz Moving Image Book Award, the author/co-editor of the book Black Arsenal: Club, Culture and Identity (2024) and co-author of the forthcoming book Race and Racism in the Creative and Cultural Industries (2025).

Ashwani Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at LCC, UAL. He is the co-founding editor of darkmatter journal and is a coordinator of the Sonic Screen Lab at LCC. He is completing a book on race, diaspora and visual culture with Bloomsbury Academic, and is the coeditor of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (Zed). Ashwani performs poetry with a recent joint publication Suburban Finesse (Sad Press). He has worked in the BBC and independent film in sound, and has been an aeronautical engineer.

Extended Book Blurb

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.

Additional Links:

• linktr.ee/KJAA_bloomsbury
• bloomsbury.com/uk/kahlil-joseph-and-the-audiovisual-atlantic-9798765103159/
• arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-communication/research-at-lcc/digital-cultures-and-economies-research-hub
• screenworlds.org
• arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-communication/research-at-lcc/sonic-screen-lab
• soas.ac.uk/research/research-centres/centre-creative-industries-media-and-screen-studies

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Important filming and photography notice: Please note that filming and photography may be taking place at this event. Both bigger crowds, smaller groups and individuals may be captured on camera. All imagery and footage may at some point be published on the College website, social media channels, and in print.