Hearing Maskanda: Musical Epistemologies in South Africa

by Barbara Titus

Overview

Hearing Maskanda outlines how people make sense of their world through practicing and hearing maskanda music in South Africa. Having emerged in response to the experience of forced labour migration in the early 20th century, maskanda continues to straddle a wide range of cultural and musical universes. Maskanda musicians reground ideas, (hi)stories, norms, speech and beliefs that have been uprooted in centuries of colonial and apartheid rule by using specific musical textures, vocalities and idioms.

With an autoethnographic approach of how she came to understand and participate in maskanda, Titus indicates some instances where her acts of knowledge formation confronted, bridged or invaded those of other maskanda participants. Thus, the book not only aims to demonstrate the epistemic importance of music and aurality but also the performative and creative dimension of academic epistemic approaches such as ethnography, historiography and music analysis, that aim towards conceptualization and (visual) representation. In doing so, the book unearths the colonialist potential of knowledge formation at large and disrupts modes of thinking and (academic) research that are globally normative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501377808
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/21/2023
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Barbara Titus is Associate Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and focuses her research on South African street music (maskanda). She is the author of Recognizing Music as an Art Form (2016).

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction – Foregrounding Aural Experiences
Part I – Maskanda in Colonial, Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa
1. Maskanda's Colonial, Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Presence
2. Foregroundings of Maskanda's Styles and Substyles
Part II – Maskanda as a Discourse of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa
3. Ground Level: The Kushikisha Imbokodo Festival in Durban
4. Middle Level: The MTN Onkweni Royal Festival in Ulundi
5. Up Level: Shiyani Ngcobo's Tour through the Netherlands
Part III – Hearing Maskanda
6. Knowing Zuluness Aurally
7. At Home in the World
8. Sharing Aural Space
Conclusion: Maskanda Epistemology
Appendix: Song Lyrics
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Attentive to her positionality as a European scholar, Titus turbans her musicological ear to maskanda. She invites readers into the pleasures of hearing Zulu musicians' syncretic creativity, while gaining an understanding of the stylistic features that musicians value. Readers will be inspired to explore this dynamic, abundant world of listening, vexed as it is by histories of racism, sexism, coloniality and scarce resources.” —Louise Meintjes, Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, USA, and author of Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid

“South African music followers and educators have long been waiting for a major intellectual study of the famous and much beloved musical form, Zulu maskanda guitar. This is at last it. Barbara Titus addresses the music and its exponents from more perspectives than we thought possible, from the artistic to the social to the philosophical. Ethnomusicologists must add this study to their libraries.” —David B. Coplan, Emeritus Professor in Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

From the Publisher