Thursday, April 29th, 2021 Collectors, Selectors, KEEPERS, and MCs: Black Feminist Sonic World-Making

Description

We are sorry to announce that the event “Collectors, Selectors, KEEPERS and MCs: Black Feminist Sonic World-Making,” originally scheduled for April 29, 2021, has been cancelled after consultation between the invited guests and the Centre for the Study of the United States. After a unanimous vote of its members last week, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has placed the University of Toronto under censure. As a result, the greater academic community, both here in Canada and internationally, has been called upon to boycott the University of Toronto. This includes speaking engagements and visits such as this event and is meant to continue until the decisions that led to censure have been more thoroughly addressed.

You can read the CAUT report here (https://www.caut.ca/latest/2021/04/caut-council-imposes-rare-censure-against-university-toronto-over-azarova-hiring), more detail of the implications of censure and the resulting boycott here (https://www.caut.ca/about-us/caut-policy/lists/administrative-procedures-and-guidelines/procedures-relating-to-censure), and media coverage in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and The Varsity. You can also find President Meric Gertler’s statement regarding censure here (https://www.president.utoronto.ca/presidents-letter-to-faculty-and-librarians-regarding-the-ihrp-program), and discussion of the events that led to censure from these three links (1 – https://drive.google.com/file/d/14nCDW6R32E7R80pFtbmrFcDOpJk57xty/view) (2 -https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RGh5JafLP-YTlvaSvK0lWOeoHs7mlvWu/view) (3 – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w3xWm1I08Ueiy9AMJYrRZsU667AfJFvJ/view).

While we hope that the censure will be short lived, we respect the wishes of our guests to honor the boycott, and we urge the university to revisit the decisions that led to its imposition.

Please check the CSUS website for updates regarding this and other events at the Centre for the Study of the United States.

———-

We gather together to amplify our understanding of hip hop as a form of Black Feminist Sonic World-Making. Akua naru, Azmera Hammouri-Davis, and Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (aka SAMMUS), Members of the global Black womxn-led KEEPERS collective (8 countries and counting!), will speak on their creation of the FIRST comprehensive digital archive to focus on the artistic work of womxn and girls throughout 5 decades of Hip Hop music and culture. Jennifer Lynn Stoever joins the conversation by sharing archival and oral history research from the “Living Room Revolutions” project on the vital but often unacknowledged role of Black and Latinx women in bringing hip hop into being in 1970s, particularly the way their record collections and home music selecting practices sounded new ways of being in the world for themselves and their families. Producer and beatmaker SAMMUS, will talk about her sound work and perform a short set that vibrates us all higher and farther on into space, helping us to imagine new futures.

Bios

theKEEPERS, represented by Akua Naru, Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, and Azmera Hammouri-Davis, are a collective of Hip Hop practitioners, scholars, and cultural workers committed to amplifying the voices and stories of Hip Hop’s womxn and girls through community programs, research projects, and collaborations. They are currently working on theKEEPER archival project, a digital archive that will map the contributions of womxn and girls across nearly 50 years of Hip Hop music and culture.

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (SAMMUS) is a rap artist and producer from Ithaca, NY with a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University in the music department where she teaches courses on rap songwriting and gender and sound. Beyond her creative work, Enongo’s research interests include Black feminist sound studies, video game music and sound design, and hip hop studies and performance. Her doctoral research, which she completed in 2019, focuses on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios.” Since joining the game studio Glow Up Games as the Director of Audio in 2019, she has also been working with a team of artists and engineers to develop a rap composition feature in a mobile-game for the HBO scripted series Insecure. In the summer of 2020 she became a member of theKEEPERS, a Hip Hop collective that is currently developing a comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across Hip Hop’s 50-year history.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever received her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from USC. She is currently Editor in Chief of Sounding Out! And Associate Professor at SUNY Binghamton, where she teaches courses on African American literature and race and gender representation in popular music. She has published in Social Text, Social Identities, Sound Effects, Modernist Cultures, American Quarterly and Radical History Review among others; her most recent research, “Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 1970s Bronx” was published in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies. In 2016, she published her first book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press