Writing as a scholar, composer, and musician, Jessie Cox foregrounds the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music in his first book, Sounds of Black Switzerland. Cox, himself Black Swiss, affirms the value of Black life through sound while critiquing anti-Blackness as a cause of erasure, silence, and limitation. He examines Swiss Nigerian composer Charles Uzor's pieces for George Floyd, work by Black Swiss musicians such as DJ MaItE ChEniEre, clarinetist JErEmie Jolo, and rapper Nativ, as well as his own musical collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. In these analyses, Cox tackles the particularities of anti-Blackness in Switzerland, creating a practice of listening beyond what can be directly heard to explore the radical potential of Black thought and experience in a nation often claimed to be race-free. In so doing, he ultimately shifts thinking about Blackness in relation to citizenship, immigration laws, gender, kinship, and belonging. By listening to Black Swiss and other voices inaudible to the current world, Cox theorizes new ways of practicing scholarly study and general ways of relating to others and the world.
Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University.
Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Black Swiss 1 1. Interstitial Listenings I: Charles Uzor's Bodycam Exhibit 3, Part I 17 2. Blackness and Black Lives in Switzerland 33 3. Interstitial Listenings II: Blurring the Hold 59 4. Afrofuturist Archeology: Citizenship and the Delimitation of Life with Death 71 5. Interstitial Listenings III: Black Music behind the Wormhole 91 6. Mothership Connections 101 7. Interstitial Listenings IV: 8'46" George Floyd in Memoriam and White Gaze II Black Square 121 8. Listening with Black Switzerland 137 9. Interstitial Listenings V: Charles Uzor's Bodycam Exhibit 3, Part II 159 10. Black Life / Schwarz-Sein 167 Conclusion. Alongside a Chorus of Voices 187 Postface. Endless Endlessness 197 Notes 203 Bibliography 225 Index
"Interspersing interstitial events of detailed listening with theoretical formulations derived from that listening, Jessie Cox teaches us about the specificities and varieties of Black life in Switzerland. He notes the fateful and fatal commonalities, particularly those that concern not just the problematic of identity but also the various forms of resistant survival that are given as refusals to identity. An extraordinary provocation and inspiration, Sounds of Black Switzerland prompts ecstatic responses and overwhelming questions." - Fred Moten, author of (Black and Blur) "Jessie Cox crucially notes the importance of musical discourses, interdisciplinary modes of knowledge production, and storytelling for the communal ontologies of Black life in diaspora in Switzerland and beyond. He takes aspects habitually overlooked by mainstream knowledges and transforms them into Black diasporic critical instruments. Redrawing the critical maps of the relationship between contemporary Black Switzerland and sonic performance, this lucidly argued, theoretically sophisticated, and timely book will make an immediate contribution to Black diaspora studies, European studies, sound studies, and cultural studies." - Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, author of (Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology)
