This presentation provides an overview of Associate Professor of Communication Taj Frazier’s research on Black and Afrodiasporic intellectual histories and political cultures. His talk will focus on his transition from exploring transnational histories and politics of cross-cultural contact to that of considering the politics and poetics of Black media art and creative community formation in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. He’ll discuss all of this using a variety of examples, which include the creative contributions and philosophical insights of Kendrick Lamar, Claudia Rankine, Edward Said, Romare Bearden, and Édouard Glissant, as well as the art and ideas of Ben Caldwell, a Leimert Park-based multimedia artist, technologist and community leader whom he is currently collaborating with on a forthcoming book and on several community-driven oral histories and archival/activation immersions. 

Professor Robeson Taj Frazier is a writer and professor of communication at USC Annenberg and director of IDEA (the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg). His research explores Black and Afrodiasporic political and popular cultures, with a specific focus on histories and current-day dynamics of race/racism, masculinity, cross-cultural contact and fellowship, and urban media and artistic practices. He is the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014), producer of the film It’s Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet (2019), and co-author of the forthcoming book, Kaos Theory: Media Arts and the Afrokosmic Villages of Ben Caldwell.

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The Annenberg Research Seminar is a weekly series for the PhD students and faculty to learn more about the research being done in the field of Communication.

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