Debut Book

My debut book - Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic: Music, Modernity, Transmedia Art (2024) - is now available to purchase via Bloomsbury Academic, Barnes and Noble, Amazon and a range of international book retailers.

Please join us for the book launch event 6.00-7.30pm on 30.01.25 in LTA (Lecture Theatre A) at LCC, UAL. This event is free but registration via Eventbrite is required.

This is the first book to: A) examine the films, music videos, advertisements and installations of filmmaker Kahlil Joseph in detail; and B) position these works - as well as many others - within an interdisciplinary, transnational framework termed: the Audiovisual Atlantic. I have given previews of this work at LCC and UCL, drawing from my doctoral research.

Kahlil Joseph is a multi award-winning filmmaker who works across different media forms. He has collaborated with musicians Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, FKA Twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha, Shabazz Palaces and Shafiq Husayn as well as fashion labels KENZO and Vans. Building on the groundbreaking audiocentric ideas set out by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), I argue that the director creates intercultural and multidisciplinary forms of expression, thereby resisting neat and simplistic categorisations and, in turn, subverting the underlying Eurocentricity on which Western notions of modernity are grounded. Advertorial available here. Use code: GLR BD8 for 20% off if you purchase via Bloomsbury's website.

This is a book that powerfully explores the creative work of Kahlil Joseph through an audiovisual black Atlantic lens. This allows the writing to use a significant artistic figure to both decolonize our understanding of blackness and black identity, and to create a rhizomic map that newly and uniquely connects and articulates the threads of black (art) history across time, space and cultural trajectories and legacies. The intervention, to show how sound is as essential as seeing, to demonstrate how audio carries identities on the images they are wedded to, is beautifully conceived, argued, and illustrated. A pleasure and privilege to read, think, and feel on.

Sean Redmond, Professor of Film and Television, Deakin, Australia

Author of Liquid Space: Science Film and Television in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic illuminates the transmedia and bold diasporic stylings of Kahlil Joseph's audio-visual artworks in all of their perplexing, and sometimes contradictory, glory. Jackson eruditely positions Kahlil's offerings at the nexus of Africa, America and Europe and at the intersection of art and capital in a way that holds a mirror up to the digitized neoliberal era we live in today. Jackson never loses sight of the humanism and cultural pluralism that underpins Kahlil Joseph's films, music videos and commercials and in so doing, manages to foreground this same humanism and pluralism in his writing, making for an incredibly insightful read.

Michael W. Thomas, Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies, SOAS, UK

Author of Popular Ethiopian Cinema: Love and other Genres (Bloomsbury, 2022)

If you want to make sense of contemporary Black cultural production, this is a must-read book. A moving, revolutionary, and multi-modal reading experience at the crossroads of black cultural studies, race, and media studies. Joe Jackson offers the very first in-depth study of award-winning filmmaker Kahlil Joseph's subversive creative work with remarkable rigour, care, and radical engagement, leading to the theorisation of the audiovisual Atlantic. Words that become sound, images, and feelings, which affectively challenge the 'white racial frame' in today's understandings of modernity.

Estrella Sendra, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Education (Events and Festivals), King's College London, UK

Dr Joe Jackson PhD FHEA
Comms & Media Lecturer

Joe Jackson has succeeded in capturing the richness of Kahlil Joseph's multifaceted creative journey by situating it within the broader context of his time. He transforms it into an epic where interests and ideals collide. Definitely a thought-provoking text.

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.

'Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic' understands that we live in a digital era where media businesses are becoming increasingly entangled. Written in an accessible style, the book offers promising new perspectives on the global film, music video and advertising industries.