Hearing Maskanda : Musical Epistemologies in South Africa

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.

“Attentive to her positionality as a European scholar, Titus turns 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