You are warmly invited to the next colloquium at the Faculty of Music, Cambridge University.
On Wednesday 9 February 17:00 (UK time), Dr Erin Johnson-Williams (Leverhulme Fellow, Durham University) will share a paper titled ‘Sounding Incarceration: The Colonial Hymn as Biopolitics’ (abstract below), followed by Q&A.
Colloquia take place in the Recital Room of West Road Concert Hall of Cambridge University and online. Please email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> for the Zoom link.
Best wishes,
2021–22 Colloquium Committee
Alexandra Leonzini, Tadhg Sauvey, Nicky Swett
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ABSTRACT
This paper considers the colonial hymn as a means of negotiating biopolitical strategies of control in the concentration camps of the South African War (1899–1902). In these spaces of enforced ‘congregating’, communal hymn singing emerged as a form of theological and aesthetic confrontation at the very moment that the modern concentration camp was invented. Eye-witness accounts of prison life in Afrikaner concentration camps, for example, reveal that the singing of Dutch-language psalm tunes and hymns occurred spontaneously at moments of personal and communal grief, as well as more formally in concentration camp funerals and prayer meetings; these hymns were also in stylistic tension with British hymnic traditions. Drawing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of biopolitical control, concentration, and racial degeneration, I propose that during the South African War the concentration camp became a heightened site of re-negotiating spaces of enforced ‘congregating’. The colonial hymn, in this context, becomes a sonic means of responding to, reinforcing and resisting new, racialised forms of mass incarceration, through its ability to mediate trauma within interned spaces. In this way, the colonial hymn both embodies and contests early twentieth-century forms of ethnic incarceration as biopolitical control, offering a way to reimagine the genre of the hymn as a negotiation between the colonised and the coloniser; and between mass conformity and the agency of collective resistance.
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