The Language of The Coding
This recorded conversation is an audio contribution to Musicology Now’s Sounds of Social Justice Roundtable. Neil Verma speaks with Yvette Janine Jackson about her recent piece, The Coding (2021), and how it engages with problems of language, race, colonial thinking, and two phenomena that have a strange overlap with one another during the pandemic era: renewed calls for racial justice and the rise of commercial space travel.
A transcript is provided for increased accessibility.
Screenshot from Yvette Janine Jackson’s The Coding (2021).
About the Sounds of Social Justice Roundtable
From Roundtable curator and Musicology Now editorial team member Joan Titus:
We have witnessed significant shifts in the past several years in terms of human and civil rights across the world, and within US politics. Music and sound are inevitably involved in the expressions of positions on these rights and the search for social justice. Pussy Riot’s songs and protests against discrimination, US Americans singing on the streets during protests, social media posts about identity and music by Indigenous Americans, and the revival of past music and civil rights icons, such as Nina Simone, in current popular media all point to civil unrest, and how music and sound are integral to human expression. This Roundtable, “Sounds of Social Justice,” offers a variety of perspectives from scholars and artists on music, sound, and social justice today. Each piece, published over the course of 2021, allows us to contemplate how people engage the global concept of social justice through specific cultures and media.
Screenshot from Yvette Janine Jackson’s The Coding (2021).
