Colloquium: Louise Meintjes, "Audible Africanity: Ululation in popular music"

Louise Meintjes headshot

November 22, 2019 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall

Louise Meintjes, Associate Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University presents her paper titled "Audible Africanity: Ululation in popular music".

Abstract:
Ululation, women’s exclamatory trilling, is a sound of the global South. I listen in to its lively inclusion in popular recordings from South Africa and beyond to ask what kind of Africanity it projects and to whom this audibility is directed. Audible Africanity produced in relation to elsewhere (and elsewhere’s ideas about history) of course returns home. I will use ethnography about Zulu ngoma production to demonstrate its reverberant reclamation.

Bio:
Louise Meintjes is Associate Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and author of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (2003, Duke UP) and Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (2017, Duke UP) which was awarded the 2018 Gregory Bateson and Alan Merriam prizes.