thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.
Cox applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sounds of Black Switzerland and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Jessie Cox's website.Thus, to be with blackness is to be together in music, together in sound, even when not together, both at the same time, because togetherness cannot, here, imply beings reduced to one among others that meet. Rather, Blackness is that which speaks of a together-apartness that is before and out of which all singularities come from—it is radically before any togetherness in contradistinction to apartness. It is like Mighty’s music. This book is not by itself, even when it appears as such: it is always with those who are named within it and those who came before it, but also those who touched my life, the lives of the readers, as well as those yet to come, yet to be unearthed in it, who will Shift the timbre of my voice. Blackness bespeaks an incompleteness theorem, that asks us to keep digging, as a continual reworking of our stories and us. It is not that the future is radically open, marking something that is closed in the past or present—rather, everything is always open, even in its closedness. How otherwise could infinities calculate into singularities from nothing, like in Jérémie Jolo and in Chénière’s musics?Page 99 is only half full. By itself it is not reflective of the whole book. But in some ways, it is quite an exemplary page. It in fact conveys a key theme found within the book: the importance of the listener (or reader) as part of that which we call the book, or the musical work. This idea is how I approach joining the opening of discourses around Black Swiss life with the unique possibilities of music. As an artform music always asks for listeners’ inventiveness—for people to listen and to do so in new ways. To me this means also to rethink how we hear, which includes recognizing how we can never hear everything and need each other, tools, materials, and experiences (or performances) to re-learn to listen. Music is radically refusing one way of listening, an end to listening, or a claim over what may be audible. This kind of musical listening practice is imaginative and, as Afrofuturists might say, world transforming. While this might seem at first to be about simply our own private worlds, it in fact, as an born in encounters, always also means a transformation of more than us. New sounds means new instruments, means new arrangements of materials, means new spaces (like for different acoustics)... Music is the sound of changing the world. Thus, this page hints to how this book petitions a re-learning to listen to unthought lives and worlds so as to make a better world. How can we critically engage in imaginative practices that create new ways of listening, sounding, making, and living, in and with the world and each other? Listening opens the question of us and our world, it is the not yet heard possibility to an unthought music.
--Marshal Zeringue
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