Sonic Imaginaries
of Africa
Research Project
This project aims to contribute to the emergence and development of the sonic imaginaries of cinematic Africa. From the beginnings of film history, Africa is an important production site for commercial films from the global North. Since music or sounds as a sensual dimension of the everyday form an elementary component of discourses and ideas about the African continent, this project aims to examine the sound of Africa in more detail, both historically and structurally. The processes and conditions of film music production will also be analysed through extensive empirical archive work.
Project Lead
Maria Fuchs
Lifetime
23.09.2024–22.09.2028
Project Assistance
(3 years 40%)
Finance
FWF (Elise Richter grant, RIC 4006324)
University / Research Place
Centre for Gender Studies and Diversity,
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz
Cooperations
Lautarchiv Berlin
Royal Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Ireland
Africa has a sound. It circulates in commercial media such as German cinema and television and conveys effective narratives about the continent as a homogeneously constructed country, into which, however, ideas of German 'Heimat' are also mixed. In musicology and its neighbouring disciplines, little attention has been paid to the central role that music plays in the multi-layered history of imaginary Africa and as part of the colonial unconscious.
A cross-section of German-language film and television history (fictional and non-fictional) is used to examine the emergence and development of audiovisual representations of Africa: The decades of colonial nostalgia and the imperial fantasies of fascism are critically examined, as are TV series of the so-called Africanised Heimatfilm.
What is completely new in this project is the inclusion of anthropological material in the analysis of the film music, which is based on empirical archive work. The examination of the film music will therefore, on the one hand, work out the continuities and historical variants of the sonic imaginary Africa. On the other hand, the production process will also be analysed. Questions about the origin of the source material in the archives (including the Lautarchiv Berlin), some of which was created in and through colonial contexts, will be critically discussed from an ethical point of view. Furthermore, the investigation of the interaction between the production and reception of media and cultural images of Africa through the marketing of film music is part of the research design.
This project aims to bring film music as one of the most powerful popular music genres of the 20th century into an exchange with the broad interdisciplinary research on (post-)colonialism and audiovisual culture as well as on sound history and sound heritage. And it will make a cultural-scientific contribution to understanding the mutual affinities between colonialism and homeland ideology.
