Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic - (New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media) by Joe Jackson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Examining the work of critically acclaimed audiovisual artist Kahlil Joseph, Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic generates ground-breaking new dialogues between a range of audial and visual theories that are shaped by Paul Gilroy's conceptualisation of The Black Atlantic (1993). The book analyzes Joseph's work through intersections of emergent music video and new media concepts as well as film theories from African, American and European perspectives. Vitally, it argues that such an interdisciplinary and transcontinental approach to film, music and new media scholarship enriches the possibilities of their respective and, simultaneously, entwined branches of knowledge"--

Book Synopsis

"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).
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 shortlisted for Best First Monograph 2025 by BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies).

Review Quotes

"The first of its kind, this book offers unique and concentrated insight into Kahlil Joseph's oeuvre. It takes seriously the role of black popular culture and the complex space that creators like Joseph occupy in the global capitalist imaginary." --Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Helen S. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry; Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University, USA

"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 University, Australia, and author of Liquid Space: Science Film and Television in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2017)

"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

"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, University of London, UK, and author of Popular Ethiopian Cinema: Love and other Genres (Bloomsbury, 2022)

"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." --Karine Barclais, Founder, Pavillon Afriques at Cannes Film Festival - Marché du Film

"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. A useful read for producers and practitioners as well as university audiences who want to learn more about international production today." --Jean-Frédéric Garcia, Managing Director, The Location Guide