Electronic dance music. Mentioning the genre elicits questions over origins and boundaries. While oft forgotten, Black queer, femme, and non-binary people invented the modern-day genre’s arrangement, composition, production, and distribution, undergirding distressed communities’ sonic landscapes, enlivening social movements, and seeding multibillion-dollar markets. From disco to house to techno, each seminar will crisscross wide-ranging geographies including Chicago, Detroit, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, New Orleans, Berlin, London, and Manchester, United Kingdom. How did disco, house, and techno empower marginalized groups in these cities to cope with the organized abandonment of urban infrastructure and public life in the 1980s and 1990s? Why did local music scenes take on global significance? This lecture series asks leading practitioners, scholars, and cultural organizers to reflect on electronic dance music’s foundation in Black musical traditions and urban history.
The lecture series compliments the course AFRAMER 146X “A Black History of Electronic Dance Music” at Harvard University in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of History.