Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic

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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 filmmaker's disruptive style merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music, challenging 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 sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle. Distinguishing the artist's personal and professional personas, this book 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 transmedia artworks, it draws from various discussions shaped by Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. By applying The Black Atlantic's disruptive audiocentric ideas to contemporary digital media forms, this book challenges the latent Eurocentricity on which dominant theorizations of 'modernity' and 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: the Audiovisual Atlantic. '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