Live Concert Photography: Asian Arts Initiative Block Party at The Rail Park 9/7/24 feat. Dub Stuy, Jonny Go Figure and Anna Morgan

Live Concert Photography: Asian Arts Initiative Block Party at The Rail Park 9/7/24 feat. Dub Stuy, Jonny Go Figure and Anna Morgan

After returning from FME in Rouyn-Noranda, earlier this month, I had a few days back home, before heading down to to Philly for the fifth installment of Asian Arts Initiative’s Sound Type Music Festival and Music Writers Workshop. Much like the July session, this trip was a quick 36 hours or so in town.

The fifth installment was led by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, a London-born, New York-based, award-winning Black British writer, theorist, interdisciplinary artist and scholar, who grew up between the UK and New York. Currently, she’s an Associate Professor at CUNY Hunter College, where she teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. She has previously worked at Cornell University, Leiden University, New York University, and Princeton University.

Goffe’s research and curatorial work is rooted in literature and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Much of her artistic and sound design practice examines the geological bedrock of colonialism. 

Dr. Goffe has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialities of colonial histories of race, geology, climate and media technologies. Her second book, Black Capital, Chinese Debt (Duke University Press) presents a long history of radicalization, modern finance and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Her forthcoming book, Dark Laboratory (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK) will discuss how the climate crisis is also a racial crisis. 

Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology and ecology through digital storytelling formats like virtual reality and augmented reality. She is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity and racial coalition towards sovereignty. 

Goffe is also an avid home cook, who gives lectures on food histories at museums and has led corporate demos. Her recipes, which also are rooted in her work colonial histories of race, geology, climate, media technologies and music have been published in various collections and cookbooks. 

Dr. Goffe’s seminar was a food demonstration that featured a recipe she created that was informed and inspired by the Asian presence in Jamaica. And it was pretty fucking delicious, I must add.

September 7th was a very busy day for the folks at Asian Arts Initiative: They were promoting a protest rally and march against the proposed new 76ers arena, which would be built within feet of Chinatown. The organization was also hosting their annual Block Party at The Rail Park, Philly’s version of The High Line. Local, community-based organizations represented quite hard. And there were some local vendors selling their wares and products.

DJs Jonny Go Figure and Anna Morgan played fire tracks on the 1s and 2s with the assistance of the Dub Stuy Soundsystem crew’s 15,000 watt soundsystem. Although there was a drenching 30-minute or so rain storm that had folks running for cover, it was a fantastic afternoon in Center City.

Check out photos from the afternoon below.