Faculty Research Seminar: "Queer Intimacies in Hip-Hop," Elliott Powell, Postdoctoral Fellow, Frederick Douglass Institute

Lattimore 540

Research Seminar

Elliott H. Powell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African & African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University, and his B.A. in History from The University of Chicago. He is currently revising his dissertation, Kindred Sounds: Afro-South Asian Musical Intersections in Jazz and Hip Hop, into a book manuscript. The project traces the resonances between African American and South Asian diasporic sonic bonds in U.S. jazz during the Cold War and U.S.-based hip hop after 9/11. In particular, it investigates these cross-cultural exchanges in relation to larger global sociohistorical junctures that linked African American and South Asian diasporic communities—1960s and 1970s social movements and the current War on Terror—and argues that Afro-South Asian cultural productions in postwar jazz and post-9/11 hip hop emerged as sites of comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and anti-imperial political alliances. Elliott H. Powell’s other research interests include: African American and Asian American Studies, Queer Studies, World Music, and the Politics and Aesthetics of Sampling.