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Louis Chude-Sokei

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Louis Chude-Sokei
Photograph of Louis Chude-Sokei taken by Cydney Scott
Born
Nigeria
EducationB.A., English (Honors); Ph.D., English
Alma materUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Occupation(s)Writer and scholar
EmployerBoston University

Louis Chude-Sokei is a writer and scholar who was born in Nigeria, raised in Jamaica, and educated in the United States. He is currently a Professor of English and Director of African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University where he holds the George and Joyce Wein Chair.[1][2] His work centers around the literary, political, and cultural phenomena of the African Diaspora.

Works

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Chude-Sokei's books include The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2005), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and the memoir Floating in a Most Peculiar Way (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).[3] His work has appeared in numerous languages, including the German publication, Race Und Technologie: Essays Der Migration (2023) and the Korean translation of Dr. Satan's Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process (2022). He is Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, one of the oldest and leading journals of Black Studies in the United States.[4] His forthcoming book is Machines of Flesh and Blood: Race and the Making of Artificial Life (Viking/Random House, 2026).[5]

Chude-Sokei published The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora in 2005, which focused on black performers who opted to wear blackface and on Black immigrants in early 20th century America who performed African American identity. It was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Non-fiction. He published The Sound of Culture in 2015, which is a history of the parallel evolution of ideas about race and ideas about technology through his analysis of science fiction and sound. Chude-Sokei's memoir Floating in a Most Peculiar Way (2021) was praised by The New York Times and described as, "Too African for Jamaica, too Jamaican for America, too American for Nigeria."[6] In assessing Chude-Sokei's three books, The New York Review of Books stated that he "does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas."[7]

Chude-Sokei's public and literary writing has been featured in various national and international platforms including The LA Times, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle, to The Believer, The Chicago Quarterly, South Africa's Chimurenga Chronic and The Daily Gleaner in Jamaica.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14] He has also appeared in numerous documentaries including the 2016 Seattle Times documentary, Under Our Skin, the 2022 documentary Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution produced by Kevin Hart, and Henry Louis Gates's Reconstruction: America After the Civil War which appeared on PBS in 2019.[15][16][17]

Sonic Arts

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Chude-Sokei is founder of Echolocution: Sonic Arts and Archiving, a project which asks the question, "What can we learn if we return to sites of trauma and violence through sound and techniques of listening?" As part of his work with Echolocution he was lead artist/curator of Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention, a sound art/sonic archiving project which won the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes Award from the German Federal Cultural Foundation in 2020.[18][1] The album of sound recordings and installations from that project was released in 2024.[19] His work in sound has led him to collaborate with a number of artists and musicians, for example, the iconic Berlin electronic artists, Mouse On Mars with whom he has produced sound installations and the album Anarchic Artificial Intelligence (Thrill Jockey, 2021).[20][21][22][23] The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company adapted sections of his book, The Sound of Culture, for their 2023-2024 touring show Curriculum II.[22] He has also collaborated and performed with renowned figures such as musician and writer, David Grubbs, artists/composers Marina Rosenfeld, Jan St. Werner, Dimitris Papadatos (Jay Glass Dubs), the Egyptian artist Yara Mekawei, the conceptual artist duo, Mendi &Keith Obadike, and the well-known Kurdish vocalist and women's rights activist, Hani Mojtahedy.[24][25][26][19]

Chude-Sokei was a curator of Carnegie Hall's 2022 Afrofuturism Festival and is currently an advisor to the Guggenheim Museum's Art and Technology Initiative in partnership with LG Electronics.[27] His work was central to the official German Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where he also contributed a sound installation entitled "Thresholds," which lent its title to the Pavilion itself.[28][29]

Awards and honors

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  • 2006 - The Last Darky, selected as a John Hope Franklin Center Book; Finalist, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Non-fiction (2007); Finalist, George Freedley Memorial Award for Outstanding Work in Theater/Performance (2007)[30][31]
  • 2019 - The Sound of Culture, Nominated for the American Musicological Society's Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award
  • 2019 - DAAD (Berlin Kunstlerprogramm/German Academic Exchange Service) Arts and Media Residency, Berlin.
  • 2020 - Kulturstiftun Des Bundes Award, German Federal Cultural Foundation
  • 2021 - Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir, a New York Times Editor's Pick, a Kirkus Books Nonfiction Book of the Year
  • 2021 - Named to the Carnegie Hall Curatorial Council for the 2022 Festival of Afrofuturism, New York City
  • 2023 - "Artificial Intelligence Assembly," Residency at the Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga California.

Bibliography

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Books

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  • Dr. Satan's Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology and the Diaspora Process (1997) ISBN 9789766102197
  • The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2006) ISBN 9780822336051
  • The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015) ISBN 9780819575784
  • Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir (2021) ISBN 9781328781079

Selected articles

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  • "Redefining Black," (2007) The Los Angeles Times.
  • "Invisible Missive Magnetic Juju: On African Cyber-Crime," (2011) The Fanzine (www.thefanzine.com).
  • "George Washington's 'Mammy,'" (2014) The Believer Magazine.
  • "The Newly Black Americans: African Immigrants and Black America," (2014) Transition: An International Review, Volume 113. 53-71.
  • "Blackness as Method," (2017) The Black Scholar, Vol. 47.4.
  • "Race and Robotics," (2019) in Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, ed. Teresa Heffernan, et al. Palgrave MacMillan.
  • "Machines and the Ethics of Miscegenation," (2019) Glass Bead Journal, Paris, France + London, England. Simultaneous translation in French and Japanese.
  • "What Was Black Studies?" (2020) The Black Scholar, 50.3 (50th Anniversary Issue).
  • "Walking with Sound: Race and the Prosthetic Ear." (2023) Soundwalking: Through Time, Space & Technologies, Jacek Smolecki, ed. Routledge Press.

References

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  1. ^ "Louis Chude-Sokei | African American & Black Diaspora Studies". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  2. ^ Chude-Sokei, Louis (2021). Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-1-328-84158-2.
  3. ^ "Louis Chude-Sokei | English". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  4. ^ "Editorial Board". The Black Scholar. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  5. ^ "Louis Chude-Sokei's Forthcoming Books is Titled Machines of Flesh and Blood". brittlepaper.com. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  6. ^ Oluo, Ijeoma (February 2, 2021). "'Too African for Jamaica, Too Jamaican for America, Too American for Nigeria'". New York Times. Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  7. ^ Getachew, Adom (2024-06-20). "Black Atlantics". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 71, no. 11. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  8. ^ Chude-Sokei, Louis (2007-02-18). "Redefining 'black'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  9. ^ Chude-Sokei, Louis (April 20, 2021). "'As Africans We Must Uplift Each Other': A Memoir of Humanitarianism". New York Times. Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  10. ^ "Rachel Dolezal brings up specter of delusional anti-racist". The Seattle Times. 2015-06-16. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  11. ^ Chude-Sokei, Louis (July 17, 2008). "For black America: The audacity of hope". The San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  12. ^ admin_bm (2014-06-01). "George Washington's "Mammy"". Believer Magazine. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  13. ^ "BIBLIO | Chicago Quarterly Review Vol. 33: An Anthology of Black American Literature by Review, Chicago Quarterly | Trade Paperback | 2021 | Independently published | 9798746947338". www.biblio.com. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  14. ^ Eshun, Kodwo; Gordon, Avery F.; Pethick, Emily (March 2017). "Navigating pan-Africanisms: On the Chimurenga Library". Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. 43: 80–87. doi:10.1086/692557. ISSN 1465-4253.
  15. ^ "In The Community / Louis Chude-Sokei Featured in Documentary Under Our Skin | Department of English | University of Washington". english.washington.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  16. ^ "Upcoming Documentary Featuring Dr. Louis Chude-Sokei | African American & Black Diaspora Studies". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-15.
  17. ^ RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA AFTER THE CIVIL WAR | Reconstruction | Part 2, Hour 2 | Episode 4 | PBS. Retrieved 2024-09-16 – via www.pbs.org.
  18. ^ "Conversation: Listening to History: Sound, Space and Remembrance - Goethe-Institut USA". @GI_weltweit. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  19. ^ a b "Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention". S A V V Y Contemporary. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  20. ^ Sherburne, Philip. "Mouse on Mars: AAI". Pitchfork. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  21. ^ Fact (2021-02-20). "CTM 2021: Mouse on Mars & Louis Chude-Sokei – AAI". Fact Magazine. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  22. ^ a b Kourlas, Gia (January 11, 2023). "Review: To the Moon! A Vivid Bill T. Jones Dance Leaves Earth's Orbit". New York Times. Retrieved September 7, 2024.
  23. ^ Festival, C. T. M. "»AAI« by Mouse on Mars & Louis Chude-Sokei". »AAI« by Mouse on Mars & Louis Chude-Sokei. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  24. ^ Markham, Dirk (2023-06-10). "David Grubbs, Jan St. Werner, Louis Chude-Sokei and Julia Reidy at KM 28 / Saturday, 24.06.2023". Digital in Berlin. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  25. ^ "Dr. Louis Chude-Sokei has been invited to participate in the 15th Annual Gwangju Biennale in South Korea | African American & Black Diaspora Studies". www.bu.edu. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  26. ^ "You Would Love Me Now (EXTQ001), by Jay Glass Dubs". Jay Glass Dubs. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  27. ^ "Meet the Afrofuturism Curatorial Council: Louis Chude-Sokei". www.carnegiehall.org. Retrieved 2024-09-07.
  28. ^ "Thresholds – the German Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia". www.ifa.de. 2024-04-15. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  29. ^ Mora, Lory (2024-04-18). "Louis Chude-Sokei Brings BU, Spoken Word, and Dub Reggae Sounds to Venice Biennale". Boston University. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  30. ^ Chude-Sokei, Louis (2006-01-16), "The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora", The Last "Darky", Duke University Press, doi:10.1515/9780822387060, ISBN 978-0-8223-8706-0, retrieved 2024-09-10
  31. ^ Association, Theatre Library (2023-10-04). "Freedley Award Finalists, 2001-Present". Theatre Library Association. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
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