Conversation and Performance: Val Jeanty with Ashon Crawley

Composer, percussionist, and DJ Val Jeanty will take part in a conversation with Ashon Crawley, associate professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia 6 p.m. followed by a performance at 7 p.m.

The event is part of DJ Summits in the Global South, a Global Georgia Initiative research project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and part of the Global Georgia Initiative public event series of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. It is presented in partnership with the Institute for African American Studies and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.

Jeanty is a Haitian-born composer, percussionist, and turntablist who uses technology to lead listeners into her dream-like, expressionist Afro-Electronica compositions. She incorporates her African/Haitian musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics, and the archaic with the postmodern.

Crawley's research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black studies, performance theory and sound studies, philosophy and theology, and Black feminist and queer theories. He is the author of "Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility" (Fordham University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming "The Lonely Letters" (Duke University Press, spring 2020).