The USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab and the School of Cinematic Arts present

Lecture by Prof. Michael B. Gillespie (NYU):

“The First Time I Laughed After September 11^th : Sonic Blackness and the Idea of Post-9/11 America”

September 12th, 2024, 2-4PM 
Albert R. and Dana Broccoli Theatre (SCA 112)
University of Southern California

Working across a series of recordings and performances, the talk considers the sonic dimensions of the art of blackness. Focusing on the irreconcilable and generative ways of a distinct circuit of songs, the talk poses a restipulation and complication of the idea of a post-9/11 America. As an act of deep listening and arrangement, the presentation imagines alternate historiographies attuned to the seditious rhythms of grief, nation, citizenship, memorialization, and pleasure.

Michael Boyce Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His work focuses on black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. His writing has appeared in Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, ASAP/J, Film Quarterly,  liquid blackness, Journal of Popular Music Studies, as well as other journals and edited collections. He was the consulting producer for The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. He is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and currently working on a monograph entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Ambivalence, Pleasure, and the Art of Blackness.