Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic

Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art

"It's wonderful to read a book that ranges across music, cinema, music video art, and literature with such ease… One of the beautiful things about this book is that it is really attentive to relationships, and this is particularly clear when talking about Kahlil Joseph's creative mentors and comrades, including Arthur Jafa and Terrence Malick." -Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Helen S. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry; Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University, USA

Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle.

This is the first book-length study of Kahlil Joseph's work. Distinguishing the artist's personal and professional personas, it traces Joseph's career trajectory and artistic output, emphasizing how the director's construction of a multifaceted filmmaking persona operates in tandem with his artworks to challenge fixed, unidimensional or stable notions of identity.

Through biographical study and deep examinations of the director's respective transmedia artworks, this book draws from various discussions shaped by Paul Gilroy's ground-breaking text The Black Atlantic (1993). By applying The Black Atlantic's disruptive audiocentric ideas to contemporary digital media forms generated by Kahlil Joseph and his peers alike, this book challenges the latent Eurocentricity on which dominant theorizations of 'modernity' – as well as the overlapping fields of Film, Media and Screen Studies – are grounded. In turn, it offers an alternative framework for negotiating the paradoxes, contradictions and transnational flows of our media-saturated present: namely, the Audiovisual Atlantic.

This book has been selected as runner up for Best First Monograph 2025 by BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies).

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