Listening to Rwandan Popular Music with Victoria Netanus Grubbs

Matrix Podcast

This episode features an interview with Victoria Netanus Grubbs, Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Black Studies Collaboratory.

Grubbs is a black feminist abolitionist educator committed to developing radical leadership in underserved communities in the U.S. and abroad. She completed her PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in May 2021. Her current book project, Kumva Meze Neza: Sounding Blackness in Rwanda, examines how popular Rwandan music works in the aftermath of genocide to produce a collective social body. Drawing on five years of participant observation amongst Rwandan music industry professionals and their audiences, her work demonstrates how shared investments in the sensory experience of blackness produce formations of togetherness that defy traditional organizing categories.

Grubbs was interviewed by Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology.

A transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/listening-to-rwandan-popular-music-with-victoria-netanus-grubbs/.