Archiving the audible debris of empire: on a mission between Africa and Britain

Abstract

Derrida’s work on ‘archive fever’ has prompted a great deal of academic reflection about the archive and what a critical ‘archiving’ of the past can imply for our understanding of the present. And yet, if the object of historical study is musical sound, what can a ‘fevered’ approach to the archive tell us through the silence of its dusty materials? When adding in the further complexity of a colonial context, the archiving of what Stoler has termed the ‘imperial debris’ of empire brings up a further conundrum: that of what I call here the ‘audible debris’ of empire: i.e. the sonic traces of power and resistance through musical sound that are otherwise absent from traditional historical narratives. In this article, I examine nineteenth-century British attitudes about music at the South African mission station of Lovedale in order to interrogate what a ‘destabilised’ archival awareness can bring to postcolonial musical scholarship. I ask how the structures of colonial archiving that created the imperial historiography of Lovedale (the ‘archival imaginary’) have influenced and reinforced the ‘disciplining strains’ of Lovedale’s musical activities. In turn, I also consider how these ‘disciplining strains’ have created audible legacies that are themselves musical archives of imperial processes.

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ORCID for Erin Johnson-Williams: orcid.org/0000-0002-3305-5783

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