Projekt

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This project will investigate the role that alternative music communities in South Africa played to imagine and create a social order different from the system of apartheid. These vestiges will be examined through an oral history project and archival work in the Hidden Years Music Archive, an archive of more than 175 000 items that encapsulates this alternative popular and folk music during the turbulence of apartheid to the early years of democracy (1959-2005). It represents musicians from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho and Botswana who were not recorded by the mainstream record companies, or received radio airtime, but nevertheless had large followings at concerts, clubs and festivals throughout the country. Of particular interest to this project are the various inter-racial events, festivals, concerts and clubs at which these musicians performed. The role that cross-border relationships and interaction between musicians at festivals and events played in the creation of this alternative movement, will also be explored. Due to the precarious state of music archives in South Africa generally and the particular provenance of this archive, the narratives contained in this material have yet to be constructed.This trans-disciplinary project, drawing on the disciplines of music studies (with sub-disciplinary methodologies from ethnomusicology, historiography, popular music studies), historiography (informed by methodologies of oral history and archival research), archival studies and sociology, will therefore address current issues relating to social development in southern-Africa through creating a platform for large-scale rewriting of South Africa's popular music history through recognising communities still on the periphery of the historical record.

• Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara

  Universität Frankfurt am Main
  Zentrum für interdisziplinäre
  Afrikaforschung (ZIAF)
  Campus Westend
  Frankfurt am Main
  

• Dr. Lizabé Lambrechts, D. Phil

  Stellenbosch University
  Department of Music
  Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS)
  Department of Music
  Stellenbosch
  Südafrika
  

• Landscapes of Loss: Curatorial Mapping and the Use of Archival Sound Recordings.

• Performing the Aporias of the Archive: Towards a Future for South African Music Archives.

• The house where history ended up: Packing up the Ben Segal Collection.