British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Janet Topp Fargion
Reviewed work(s):
Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West by Erlmann
Veit
Source: British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2000), pp. 156-157
Published by: British Forum for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3060653
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156 BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.9/li 2000
ERLMANN, VEIT, Music, modernity,
and
the
global imagination:
South
Africa
and the West. New York and
Oxford: Oxford
University Press,
1999.
312pp., notes, index. ISBN
0-19-512367-0
(?50).
Erlmann's work on South Africa has
taken a
logical
course.
African
stars:
studies in Black South
African
performance (1991)
was a broad
overview of
many performance genres
in
South Africa; Nightsong: performance,
power
and
practice
in South
Africa
(1996)
examined one
genre,
isicathamiya,
in detail, while
referencing
the role of the West in terms of
performance practice theory. Music,
modernity,
and the
global imagination:
South
Africa
and the West
completes
the
"trilogy" by providing insight
into the
relationship
between Africa and the West,
not
osly by describing
actual events,
but
also
by exploring
the social contexts in
which the events occurred. The book
examines how music
genres emerged by
asking
what are or were the social
conditions that
facilitate(d)
the
emergence, formulation, change
and
perpetration
of such
genres.
Thus Music,
modernity,
and the
global imagination
is
not a book about "world music"
(6).
Rather,
it is a
history
of
political
ideas
articulated within a musical context.
Erlmann describes two
episodes
in the
history
of Black South African music:
tours made
by
the African Choir and the
Zulu Choir between 1890-4 to the UK and
USA; and the
emergence
of Paul Simon's
Grammy Award-winning
album
Graceland in 1986. He invokes a wide
range
of "texts"
including
the music, press
releases,
travel accounts, and a host of
"players [including]
African National
Congress
co-founder Saul
Msane, Queen
Victoria,
African-American musician and
impresario Orpheus McAdoo,
Xhosa
Christian
prophet Ntsikana,
W.E.B. du
Bois, Michael Jackson, and
Spike
Lee"
(front flap)
as well as the
group Ladysmith
Black Mambazo.
Analysing history
through
such texts, Erlmann describes an
"imagined totality
-
a
totality
united not so
much
by things
such as international trade,
multilateral
agreements,
or the institutions
of modem
society
as
by
a
regime
of
signs
and texts"
(4).
The
signs
and texts allow us
to
explore
the
ways
in which
people
see
and
express
the world, and the
ways
in
which
they
see themselves within it. This
"ethnography
of the
global imagination"
(4)
thus
explores
the
processes
involved in
the creation of
personal
and cultural
identities.
Rather than the narrative
presenting
a
continuous stream of events from one
point
in time to another
-
as is usual in the
presentation
of
history
-
here a
period
of
100
years separates
the two
episodes
described. These are moments in
history
and
political thought
-
late nineteenth
century
colonialism and late twentieth
century postcolonialism
-
that Erlmann
sees as "orders
[that]
are at heart societies
of the
spectacle" (5).
In the late 1900s
new
technologies
for
representing
the
world with narrative came into
being.
The
panorama (the
earliest form of mass
media, followed some time later
by film)
facilitated the
portrayal
of
images
without
interruption;
it created a "total
space
...
that enabled the viewer to become ...
someone who enters an
image
rather than
someone who
contemplates
it from
outside"
(5-6).
Erlmann views the
(colonial)
panorama as a
"proto-
cyberspace" (5-6), cyberspace being
a
sphere
we now take as real. It is within
this total
space
that Erlmann examines the
tours of the South African choirs, and the
Graceland album and
subsequent
Ladysmith
Black Mambazo collaborations.
The book is divided into two
parts.
Part I, "Heartless swindle": the
African
Choir and the Zulu Choir in
England
and
America,
consists of seven
chapters
examining songs,
texts and narratives
BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.9/ii 2000
making up
the "drama"
(165)
that
determined the destinies of those
directly
involved in the tours of the African Choir
(1890-4)
and the Zulu Choir
(1892-3)
to
the UK and USA. But
arguably
as
important,
we learn how the events also
helped
to define more wide-scale
perceptions
that
shaped
political
developments
over the
following century.
Many
of the choir members became
active
politically
on their return to South
Africa. To their services
they brought
their
perceptions
of the
potentials
of the
West where, for a time before the
institutionalization of
apartheid
in
1948,
they
"were able to
put
into
practice
at
least some of the visions of
justice
and
enlightened leadership
which their tours
had enacted"
(166).
The "heartless
swindle"
encapsulates
the fact that the
tours were financial disasters which left
the artists in debt and abandoned
by
the
white
managers,
as well, perhaps,
as the
fact that it was to be almost another
hundred
years
before the "visions of
justice
and
enlightened leadership"
would result in the
envisaged
liberation.
Part II, "Days of
miracle and
wonder ": Graceland and the continuities
of
the
postcolonial world, examines not so
much the events
surrounding publication
of the album in 1986 as the
aesthetics,
practices
and
genres upon
which the work
draws
(see,
for
instance,
"world
beat",
Chapter 10,
and
isicathamiya, Chapter
11). Positioning
the
isicathamiya group,
Ladysmith
Black
Mambazo, and its
leader, Bhekizizwe
Joseph Shabalala, at
the centre of the
analysis,
the section
goes
on to
explore,
in
Chapter 13, biographical
texts presented in a
documentary
(Journey
of
dreams, directed
by
David
Lister, 1988),
in the
biography
The
life
and works
of
Bhekizizwe Shabalala and
the
Ladysmith
Black Mambazo
(Thembela
and
Radebe, 1993)
and in Shabalala's
works recorded on over 30 albums.
In the final
chapters,
Erlmann looks at
"racial
ambiguities" (172) emergent
in
both black and white cover versions of
the famous
isicathamiya
tune "Mbube"
(Chapter 14),
and the inclusion of
Ladysmith
in Michael Jackson's video
Moonwalker
(Chapter 15).
These
chapters very clearly
demonstrate the
ways
in which South African music and
performers
have been
incorporated
into
the mainstream of
popular
music. In a
sense, they provide
case-studies for the
examination of the
globalization process.
In
taking
on the
subject
of
globalization,
Erlmann has
accepted
an
ambitious task. The
concept
in
many
senses has come to resemble "world
music", that is,
it is
freely
used but also
freely interpreted,
to the extent that its
use
may
have become
meaningless.
We
all know we live in a
"rampant global
age" (3)
but the
precise
characteristics of
this
age
remain elusive. Erlmann's work
achieves an
analysis
and as such is
important
for
anyone
who is interested in
furthering
their
understanding
of the
world
they
live in.
References
Erlmann,
Veit
(1991) African
stars:
studies in Black South
African
performance. Chicago
and London:
University
of
Chicago
Press.
.
(1996) Nightsong: performance,
power
and
practice
in South
Africa.
Chicago
and London:
University
of
Chicago
Press.
Thembela, Alex J. and Radebe, Edmund
P.M.
(1993)
The
life
and works
of
Bhekizizwe Shabalala and the
Ladysmith
Black Mambazo.
Pietermaritzburg:
Out of Reach
Publishers.
JANET TOPP FARGION
International Music Collection
British
Library
National Sound Archive
janet.topp-fargion@bl.uk
157