Upcoming ISRF Book Launches: Like Lockdown Never Happened & Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique
Join us on 23rd January in London to celebrate Joy White's 'Like Lockdown Never Happened', and 27th February in Lisbon for Sandra Araújo's 'Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74'.
We associate life under COVID-19 with shutdown and shut-in. But we tried to hang on to our creative lives. While much of the world stopped, did our relations to music and other arts take off in new directions?
UD Music, London, E15 2QS | 6pm GMT | In-Person Only
In Terraformed, sociologist Joy White explored how austerity and gentrification intersected with music in shaping the lives of Black youth in the Forest Gate neighbourhood of London. Now, in her new book, Like Lockdown Never Happened, Dr White shows how Black music and culture reshaped our lives in the first 18 months of the pandemic.
Under COVID-19, music listening increased as people used it to help counter the psychological fallout of lockdown—the isolation, restriction and boredom. At the same time, concerts and other musical events moved online. Even when lockdown eased, social distancing meant that group musical and cultural events took on new formats.
With a focus on contemporary Black music, this book takes a deep dive into the various forms that popular culture took over this period: Kano's Newham Talks series; Steve McQueen's BBC anthology Small Axe; the Verzuz DJ Battle series; TikTok's Don't Rush Challenge; radio station theresnosignal; and many more.
The book seeks to make sense of chronological and kairotic time in the early era of the pandemic. It shows how Black joy and sonic Black geographies were keys to the culture of this period. At this book launch, Dr White and several commentators will discuss how Black music and Black creative expression soundtracked and sustained us through COVID-19, and how this work continues to shape our relations to culture and to each other.
Joy White is Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire, and the author of Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise.
Joy will be joined by Karis Campion, Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Social Justice at City, University of London; Jade Levell, Senior Lecturer in Social & Public Policy at the University of Bristol; and Nathaniel Télémaque, Visual Artist, Writer and Lecturer in Geography and Social Justice at King’s College London. A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.
Join us from 6pm GMT on Thursday 23rd January 2025 at UD Music, London. Register Now.
Colonial powers use a range of techniques to control their colonial populations. These include mixtures of violence and the exploitation of religious and other social divisions. How did Portugal improvise with these colonial practices to rule Mozambique? What were the effects?
Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa | 5pm WET/GMT | In-Person & Online
In this in-depth and compelling study, Sandra Araújo uses archival and oral sources to uncover a full-fledged intelligence agency and explore Portugal’s counterinsurgent spying on Muslim communities during Mozambique’s liberation struggle.
She pays particular attention to Portuguese intelligence gathering practices, the social realities this imposed on Muslims residents during the war, and to popular responses to Portuguese efforts to turn them against FRELIMO’s efforts to free Mozambique from colonial rule. Araújo’s book contributes to a new understanding of colonial security strategies in Mozambique during the liberation war, and sheds new light on the history of colonial counterinsurgency more broadly.
Please join us for Sandra Araújo’s presentation and the discussion of her book.
Sandra Araújo is a Junior Researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa. For the duration of her ISRF First Book Fellowship, she was a visiting researcher at the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick.
Sandra will be joined by Mustafah Dhada, Professor of History at California State University, Bakersfield; and Martin Thomas, Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Academic Editor.