Jesse Bernard will be here to talk about his latest book Escaping Babylon. Jesse will be in conversation with author Adèle Oliver.

Shapeshifting, collaborative, endlessly inventive and robustly empowering: Black music has transformed British culture and society, and gifted generations of Black Britons a powerful means to reject misrepresentation and find freedom and joy in sound.

From the height of jungle and UK soul in the 90s to the London uprisings in 2011 and the rise of the internet, filmmaker and DJ Jesse Bernard examines how Black culture in Britain is moulded through the migration of sound across the Atlantic.

Jesse Bernard is a writer, DJ, music researcher and filmmaker. He has written for publications including GQ, The Guardian, NME, Esquire and Vinyl Factory. He is tour DJ for the British MC Lord Apex and hosts a monthly radio show, Home Comforts, on Voices Radio. His most recent documentary, COMO VOCÊ, explores the links between the grime scene in Brazil and London.

Adèle Oliver is a writer, artist and PhD researcher. Her current research focuses on the aesthetics, infrastructures and technologies of social change in Black electronic music in the UK, Brazil, and Portugal. Her book Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill counters panic-fuelled discourse on UK drill, gang violence, and knife crime, ‘deeping’ drill as a complex Black artform. Adèle is also a core member of Art Not Evidence and works as an expert witness in cases that use Black youth culture, music, and idiomatic language as evidence of bad character, criminality and/or gang affiliation.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

This event is part of The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival and is supported by National Lottery Grants Funding through Arts Council England.