Bio:
Shana L. Redmond is a native of Racine, Wisconsin and the daughter of working-class parents, whose experiences of service work and incarceration profoundly impacted her political and racial identity. It is from these experiences and knowledges that she approaches her scholarship and activist work, which are both concerned with laying bare and challenging the material conditions that encode and enforce difference and inequality. Labor, carceral regimes, and racial justice are some of her activist and scholarly interests.
As a scholar, Redmond pulls from multiple subjects, strategies, and approaches in her work and situates her scholarship in and between fields including Black Studies, Performance Studies, History, Critical Ethnic Studies, Sound Studies, English and Literature, Cultural Studies, and (Ethno)Musicology. Her new book is an experimental cartography of the global polymath Paul Robeson and his repetition as vibration, hologram, and the built environment during and after his lifetime. Titled Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, the book forwards a theory of “antiphonal life” in order to announce his continuing influence and labors in the political life of artists, organizers, and intellectuals.
Her first book, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, examines the sonic politics performed amongst and between organized Afro-diasporic publics in the twentieth century. Redmond’s efforts as a musician and labor organizer shaped the form and argumentation of the book, which develops a transnational cultural history of Black racial formations and performance politics. The mixtape that accompanies Anthem, produced and mixed by The Dreadstar Movement, can be found here.
Redmond is currently at work on two book length projects. The first, The Next Jubilee: Black Music and the Possible Impossible, details how Black musical techniques forecast new futures. She is additionally writing a book about “first-world” aid musics titled The Song that Saved the World, which reads songs like “We Are the World” as composing a benevolent regime of failed internationalism. In all of her work, music is both her inspiration and—as Paul Robeson, Fela Kuti, and others have advanced—her weapon; it is the origin of her critique and the method through which alternatives to our present may be heard.
In addition to her scholarship, Redmond has served as a guest expert for the Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles, contributed to numerous interviews for web and radio programming, and written for online publications, including NPR, the Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, and USApp for the London School of Economics.
A mentor and comrade, Redmond is happy to communicate with anyone interested in similar ideas or projects of liberation. She can be reached in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and followed on Twitter @ShanaRedmond.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).