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The Global Cultures Institute and LITAID: Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora welcomes Professor Kevin K. Gaines to deliver the 2025-26 Annual Lecture.
Stevie Wonder’s rise to international fame as a pop artist during the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the US civil rights movement and the high tide of African national liberation struggles. So how did these international events influence his music?
In this talk, Professor Gaines will situate Wonder’s 1979 album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants within the artist’s engagement with global cultures and social movements.
He argues that the album was influenced by Wonder’s presence at FESTAC ’77, the pan-African arts and cultural festival held in Lagos, Nigeria. As a non-commercial, experimental and ambitious album – with more instrumental, extended form compositions than radio-friendly singles for the pop market – Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants challenged listeners to hear affinities between multiple genres and global styles of music.
Created as a soundtrack to the documentary of the same name, Wonder’s compositions drew inspiration from African, Indian, Japanese, and European classical and traditional musics. The global stylistic range of Wonder’s musical aesthetics was tied to the content of the film and the best-selling book on which it was based – a book which argued that plants were sentient creatures, responsive to human emotions.
Despite the album’s decidedly mixed critical reception, Professor Gaines argues that Wonder’s collaboration with the filmmakers’ was a singular expression of mysticism and ecological consciousness, combined with a personal rejection of negative views of disability.
About the speaker
Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice, with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. The new professorship was created to honor the legacy of Bond, the civil rights champion and former University of Virginia professor. Gaines’ current research is on the problems and projects of racial integration in the United States during and after the civil rights movement.
He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Prize. His book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gaines is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009-10).
His current research is on the integrationist projects of African American activists, artists and intellectuals, interventions that redefined blackness and acknowledged the relationship of structural and ideological forms of racism to racial capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia.
Booking information
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Event details
8th Floor NorthBush House
Strand campus, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG