About SBB

Sounding Black Britain: Black British Music, Culture, and Global Influence is a chapbook series dedicated to publishing the next generation of voices writing on Black British music. Each volume is curated and brings together undergraduate and postgraduate student research alongside poetry, prose, and artwork.

We believe the essays written in from university seminars, assignments and dissertations contain insights that deserve a permanent, public home. Too often, this work is read once by a marker and then forgotten. Sounding Black Britain exists to change that.

The series centres Black British musical production (e.g. from post-war Caribbean sound systems and reggae to jungle, Afrobeats, Afroswing, jazz, to emerging genres and beyond) as a distinct cultural force with truly global influence. SBB publishes work that treats this music seriously: as history, as politics, as embodiment, as resistance, as joy.

Each volume is available as a free, open-access PDF and as a print-on-demand chapbook. SBB is not a traditional peer-reviewed journal. We are a curatorial project, a pedagogical intervention, and a permanent archive of student thinking on Black British sound. Importantly, we are the foundation of the discipline of Black British Music.