Jessie Cox

Harvard University Department of Music

Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP 2025) presents one of the first monographs centering Black life in a country that lacks a discourse around race. Switzerland collects no racial data and possesses no shared national term for Black life, yet antiblackness was identified by the UN in 2022 as an urgent structural issue, and recent cases of police violence have made this silence increasingly untenable. I claim that musical listening and practice can reveal alternate ways of theorizing and thinking and thus a site to open the study of Black lives. In this talk I demonstrate how musical works such as Charles Uzor’s compositions for George Floyd are alternate archives, where Blackness in Switzerland can be heard despite its erasure. I argue that listening often mirrors Switzerland’s national myth of neutrality through claims to objectivity. By critiquing this presumed neutrality, I develop a more expansive approach to listening, an interstitial listening, that continually sits with inaudibility as its condition of audiation.

Musics Abroad: Jessie Cox "Listening Otherwise with the Sounds of Black Switzerland"