Dhanveer Singh Brar - Unhoused Music

About this event

In the context of ULIP's Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship, this event is part of Professor AbdouMaliq Simone's research project entitled 'Urban Life at the Extensions', a 5-day series of dialogue in Paris. Centred around five working themes, this programme brings together scholars, activists and urbanists to draw from their respective domains and locations.

Recently, DJ Lynée Denise gave us a lesson on the constructions of Techno and House as objects of discourse (i.e. as entities which are written, spoken and visualised into existence). She reminded us that such discursive activity relies on a very limited and unfaithful rendering of site specificity: namely Techno is from Detroit (and therefore there is a defined Detroit Techno sound) and House is from Chicago (as such, there is a Chicago House sound). Denise insisted that the real constitution of Techno and House as sonic projects (and therefore Chicago and Detroit as products and makers of those projects) is always already unsettled, blurred, and skewed, due to the fact that those generating the music were constantly cutting back and forth between these two Midwest cities. Dhanveer Singh Brar wants to take a lead from Denise, and asks, in light of this productive unsettling of the very idea of House music as singularly located: how do we go about hearing House? How do we go about encountering it? What does it tell us of its conditions? 

Respondent: Professor AbdouMaliq Simone.

Attendees are invited to register in advance by emailing: eugene.brennan@ulip.lon.ac.uk 

Speakers

Dr Dhanveer Singh Brar is a writer, researcher, and teacher focussing on questions of race, culture, aesthetics, politics and theory from the mid-twentieth century to the present. He has published two books, Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) (The 87 Press), and Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century (Goldsmiths Press). Dhanveer is also member of two research and performance projects, “Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective” (with Louis Moreno, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Fumi Okiji, Paul Rekret and Ronald Rose-Antoinette) and “Lovers Discourse” (with Edward George). He is a Lecturer in Black British History at the University of Leeds.  

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone is a Senior Professorial Fellow at The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab of the Polytechnic University of Turin, and has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the Rujak Centre for Urban Studies in Jakarta and at the University of Tarumanagara. AbdouMaliq is also the author of many groundbreaking works, most recently he authored The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture (2022).