Sounds of Black Switzerland

Scholar and musician Jessie Cox foregrounds the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music, showing how work by Black Swiss musicians opens up new ways of hearing and exploring the radical potential of Black thought.

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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 Maïté Chénière, clarinetist Jérémie Jolo, and rapper NATIV, and his own musical collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. In these analyses, Cox tackles the particularities of antiblackness 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.