Waveforms & Life-Worlds: A Sonic Atlas of the Urban Diaspora - Detailseite

Course Description: The Fugue of Text, Sound, and Flesh
The Dreaming Room is an advanced human geography seminar that interrogates the production of life-
worlds as a radical response to the historical and ongoing dehumanization of diasporic populations globally.
Moving beyond "transparent" Cartesian geography—which often renders the African Diaspora as a mere
"ungeographic" interruption—this course centres the interconnection between written and sonic texts as its
primary method. Music acts as a literary text and a place-making apparatus. While written theory (Sharpe,
Fanon, Shabazz, Pickens) provides the analytical "grid," sonic texts (Kendrick Lamar, Sade, Solange, Janet
Jackson) provide the "waveforms"—the rhythmic and acoustic cognitive schemas that affirm modes of
being human outside the capitalist-colonial paradigm. By "reading" music as a site of territorial production,
students will explore how identities act as a "situating force" across multiple scales: from the urban streets
of Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt to the ports of Liverpool and Naples, and across to Toronto, Kingston,
and Los Angeles. As a seminar within Women and Gender Studies, we maintain an unwavering focus on
the intersectionality of gender (women, men, and transgender folks), race, class, abilities (disability and
cognitive difference), and religion(specifically the racialization of Muslim and Christian identities). We
interrogate how different bodies navigate the "Geographies of Exclusion" produced by the "White Spatial
Imaginary". Centring the radical act of "dreaming" (inspired by Laura Mvula and Saidiya Hartman), the
curriculum maps how communities practice different ways of being that refuse capture and insist on a
"revolutionary demand for happiness".

Lecturer Profile
Andrew M. Thomas is a scholar in human geography specializing in the intersections of Queer, Black, Emotional, and Psychoanalytic Geographies. A queer Jamaican-born Canadian settler, he is currently conducting doctoral fieldwork in Berlin, focusing on the lived experiences of gay and queer men of African heritage as they navigate belonging and make the city "home". His previous work at Humboldt-Universität included developing decolonial and anti-racist frameworks for archival and art collections.