Voices that Matter?

Abstract

How do we thoroughly historicize the voice, or integrate it into our historical research, and how do we account for the mundane daily practices of voice . . . the constant talking, humming, murmuring, whispering, and mumbling that went on off stage, in living rooms, debating clubs, business meetings, and on the streets? Work across the humanities has provided us with approaches to deal with aspects of voices, vocality, and their sounds. This article considers how we can mobilize and adapt such interdisciplinary methods for the study of history. It charts out a practical approach to attend to the history of voices—including unmusical ones—before recording, drawing on insights from the fields of sound studies, musicology, and performativity. It suggests ways to “listen anew” to familiar sources as well as less conventional source material. And it insists on a combination of analytical approaches focusing on vocabulary, bodily practice, and the questionable particularity of sound.

Oral/Aural: Pastness and Sound as Medium and Method

“…8 Voice is one of the heartland concepts of African history alongside experience, and it is through a study of orality that these two concepts are activated and put to work in specific contexts. 9 These contexts have their own political stakes, as is clear in part in how the colonial discourse of disappearing authenticities in Africa has direct ties to orality as a condition of knowledge-making from Africa, resembling almost an accusation of media primitivism. 10 As philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne has it, detractors of African philosophy wield orality as a limitation of knowledge-making, in which orality is 'fragile like the memory of the ancestors; that the continuity of its passage is menaced by rupture, synonymous with death' .…”

Iingoma Zomzabalazo in Conversation: An Archival Engagement with Recordings of Liberation Songs

“…8 Voice is one of the heartland concepts of African history alongside experience, and it is through a study of orality that these two concepts are activated and put to work in specific contexts. 9 These contexts have their own political stakes, as is clear in part in how the colonial discourse of disappearing authenticities in Africa has direct ties to orality as a condition of knowledge-making from Africa, resembling almost an accusation of media primitivism. 10 As philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne has it, detractors of African philosophy wield orality as a limitation of knowledge-making, in which orality is 'fragile like the memory of the ancestors; that the continuity of its passage is menaced by rupture, synonymous with death' .…”