Overview
Victoria Netanus Xaka is a black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator. She is the founder of the recording studio and label GMC Records Rwanda, and has been making music in community with Rwandan artists since 2012. Her academic and creative work center the Black Radical Tradition and black feminist dreamspace. She is deeply invested in the study and practice of fugitive creativity, and her work is devoted to revealing how and where black sociality uses the material affordances of sound to create experiences that evade capture and exploitation by capital accumulation. Victoria is also passionate about using semiotics to demonstrate how shared investments in the sensory experience of blackness bring forth a collective interpreting body that refutes both the possibility of and the desire for the individual human subject. Her current book project Kumva Meze Neza: Sounding Blackness in Rwanda is an ethnography of contemporary Rwanda’s popular music industry that demonstrates how cultural workers give shape to a collective ontology predicated on the sounding and circulation of blackness through the grammars of flesh, skin, breath, and blood. Her article, “Blackness: A Quale,” which demonstrates the methodological implications of semiotics for black study, is under review with Sound Studies (forthcoming Spring 2025).
Before joining the Music Department at Cornell, Victoria was a Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University in May 2021. She also holds an M.Ed. in Sociology and Education from Columbia University Teachers College and a B.A. in Ethnomusicology and Music Education from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands.
