Welcome to our podcast series ‘On The Bookcase’, featuring female authors from across the world, with host Fiona Ross and original music from Hannah Horton. We were excited to find our podcasts named as one of the Top 15 Women In Media Podcasts on the web by Feedspot! Huge thank you to them! You can also find our podcasts at number 9 in the top 60 Best Jazz Podcasts in FeedSpot!
In this episode we welcome Dr Alexis McGee, to talk about her new book, From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics
Dr. Alexis McGee received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at San Antonio where she also received two certificates of concentration in Linguistics and Rhetoric and Composition. Drawing from this background, McGee is an interdisciplinary scholar who engages with various fields and sub-disciplines such as Rhetoric, Composition/Writing Studies, Black Studies, Critical Pedagogies, Sound Studies, as well as Women and Gender Studies. Her concentrated research interests, more specifically, focus on Black women’s rhetorical uses of voice, literacies, and expression.
McGee’s book, From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics, (SUNY 2024), amplifies Black women’s ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women’s sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.
Her work has been featured on BBC Radio4 and published in various venues including College, Composition, and Communication (forthcoming, 2022); Rhetoric Review (2021); Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2018); Obsidian (2017); and Pedagogy (2016).