CTLWS Presents “‘Afro-Punk’ in the 21st Century” with James Spooner
The event will take place at 2 pm on Friday, Oct. 21st at this zoom link: https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/88409240614. (Meeting ID: 884 0924 0614).
In 2003 James Spooner directed a ground-breaking music documentary titled “Afro-Punk.” The film helped to bring together a national community of people of color who cared about the punk ethos and black identity, and led to the establishment of an annual Afropunk music festival in Brooklyn that was originally free and community-oriented. In recent years more commercial but still vibrant versions of the festival have been held in cities from Minneapolis, Atlanta, Paris, London, and Johannesburg.
Spooner continues to be active as an author, artist, curator, tattooist, and documentarian. Most recently he has published a memoir in the form of a powerful graphic novel titled “The High Desert” (2021), and assisted in curating and presenting a major retrospective of Jean-Michel Basqiat’s work exploring the painter’s involvement in New York’s 1980s underground music scene at the Broad Museum in downtown LA.
James’s talk is offered to the campus community by faculty and students in the CTLWS [Culture, Text, Language, and World Societies] / Humanities + Path. Students in the programs “Psychology and Popular Music” and “Advanced Studies in Music and Humanities” helped put the event together. The visit is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. Learn more about Spooner’s life and work at: https://www.spoonersnofun.com/.
