"In Sounds of Black Switzerland Jessie Cox examines Black lives in Switzerland, making audible the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music. Writing not just as a scholar, but also as a composer and musician, and including himself in the nebulous category of Black Swiss, Cox clarifies and brings to the fore an identity previously hard to define within Swiss culture. Taking Swiss-Nigerian composer Charles Uzor's pieces for George Floyd as a centerpiece, the book moves by way of the globality of Black Lives Matter protests to tackle the particularities of antiblackness in Switzerland and to ultimately shift our thinking, with blackness, as it pertains citizenship, immigration laws, gender, kinship, and belonging. Cox's work affirms the value of Black life through sound, while also critiquing antiblackness as a cause of erasure, silence, and limitation. By combining listening practices with theoretical discussions of antiblackness, Black diaspora, and Black life in modern European spaces, Sounds ofBlack Switzerland examines aspects habitually overlooked by mainstream knowledge and rethinks what it means to be Black in predominantly white European nation-states"--
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.
