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The next item in the Department of Music’s colloquium series will be Dr Naomi Waltham-Smith, Reader in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, who will be giving a talk entitled: ‘The Riotous Sounds of Circulation Struggles in (Post)colonial Paris: the gilets jaunes and le rap français’.

Playing on the double sense of Marx’s “noisy sphere of circulation” as flows of commodity exchange and as infrastructures of distribution and movement, this talk looks at the entangled imbrications of French hip hop and the gilets jaunes in struggles over, through, and against modes of circulation. It explores how sonic cultures contribute to the formation of (post)colonial imaginaries, putting into deconstruction the opposition between quasi-expansionist circulation and anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist blockage. This political analysis of the gilets jaunes through the prism of sonic production is illustrated with field recordings and photos made during extensive fieldwork at protests and demonstrations in Paris conducted over the last decade.

Event details

Saint Davids Room
Strand Building
Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS