Listening to Black Sonic Worlds: a three-part lecture with Dr Uhuru Phalafala
In the first semester of 2022, CKR hosted Listening to Black Sonic Worlds: a three-part lecture with Fr Uhuru Phalafala.
Poster advertising Dr Uhuru Phalafala’s lecture series with CKR. 2022. Poster designed by Keenan Oliver.
This was an exclusive lecture series hosted for Postgraduates of all levels at Michaelis School of Fine Arts and the broader University of Cape Town postgraduate community.
In the first lecture titled 1st Movement: Introduction, Dr Phalafala explored how jazz forms, informs and transforms black socio-political and cultural transnationality. Dr Phalafala deployed various media, from jazz records to the scope of “DJ scholarship”, Pan-African conferences and festivals, autobiographies, photography and listening sessions, as maps to wander and wonder through these terrains.
The second lecture 2nd Movement: Go tsamaya ke go bona thought through histories of the black radical tradition using the modality of jazz. Amongst others, the lecture investigated how black sonic cultures can intervene in archival gaps unaddressed by literature, visual culture, history, and ephemera. Some of these questions form part of the sonic documentary – Home is Where the Music Is* – in which these questions departs and returns to.
LISTEN: Home is Where the Music Is*
Dreamed by Uhuru Phalafala, and with audio weavings by Ben Verghese, the Sonic Documentary is a companion to the book Home is Where the Music Is, published by Chimurenga.
The third lecture, titled 3rd Movement: Gathering meditated on spiritual dimensions of the sonic. Gathering was concerned with the synthesis of those worlds, through a convergence of the phono with the optic; through gathering the matrilineal and patrilineal cultures as mutually reinforcing; and gluing together the future with the past in the present. As a practice, the section on gathering was preoccupied with otherworlds, the otherwise, and the elsewhere, accessible through a complete break with the paradigm of Euro-patriarchal conceptions of the world.