Arts & Culture
Showing that Black lives matter — everywhere

In a new book, music professor considers race in all its facets

Nikki Rojas

Harvard Staff Writer

March 14, 2025 3 min read

Jessie Cox.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Growing up in Switzerland, Jessie Cox found it difficult to speak about being Black. Black lives remained largely unthought of in the tiny, land-locked nation, he believed.

Since then, he’s thought about them. In his new book, “Sounds of Black Switzerland,” Cox, an assistant professor of music who’s currently teaching an advanced course on studio collaboration, addresses the dynamics of race in a place where it is rarely discussed.

“One task for me was to open a discourse about Black Switzerland. Another task was to contribute to the thinking of Blackness and Black studies,” said Cox, a composer, drummer, and scholar from the western city of Biel.

“Sounds of Black Switzerland,” released in February as Cox dove into his second semester at Harvard, fuses cultural appraisal and sophisticated music criticism. Some chapters are devoted to Blackness and Afrofuturism. Another analyzes how anti-Blackness can rest on color-blindness and erasure. Cox examines the associated challenges with Switzerland’s judiciary system, immigration law, and notions of national belonging.

Yet Cox didn’t want his critique of anti-Blackness to anchor the book.

“Rather, I wanted to uncover the imaginative possibilities that we can come to think and hear under the term ‘Blackness,’” he said. “My goal was to show that there are inherent possibilities uncovered in all these discourses around Black life and Blackness in the U.S. and globally.”

Cox said he was inspired by Nigerian Swiss composer Charles Uzor, who wrote a series that includes “Bodycam Exhibit 3: George Floyd in Memoriam,” to which Cox devotes a full chapter. The 2020 murder in Minneapolis was later compared to the case of Mike Ben Peter, a Black man who died in 2018 after being pinned down by six police officers in the Swiss city of Lausanne.

Determined not to reduce the Black experience to the violence Black communities face, Cox also draws on songs by popular Swiss artists, including the Bern-based rapper Nativ.

“Nativ has this piece in which the chorus says, ‘Today is a good day for change’ in Swiss German, but the word ‘change’ is in English, so it’s a reference to Barack Obama,” Cox explained.

Also unpacked is the seminal title “Farbe bekennen” (“Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out”) by May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz. The 1986 book is often credited with kickstarting Afro German studies and igniting discussions on race across Europe.

“To be able to think about what we are going through in our lives and our world in as many facets as we can is crucial to coming together and learning about each other’s experiences,” said Cox, who taught a fall 2024 course titled “Music to Re-imagine the World: From Afrofuturism to Experimental Music Across Planet Earth.”

“There is very radical possibility that we can get — if we invest in artistic practice as a space for imagining new worlds — new ways of being, new commonalities, and new relations,” he said.