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.
"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"--