Africa Table: Sonically Engineering Subjects-Colonial Cultural Disarmament as State Making

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for African Studies
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 219, 417 Galvez Mall

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Sonically Engineering Subjects-Colonial Cultural Disarmament as State Making

Mhoze Chikowero, Associate Professor of African History at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Twentieth century African cultural history has been given to us largely as popular culture and entertainment. Thinking with his award-winning book, African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (2015), UCSB Associate Professor of African history Mhoze Chikowero posits a radical re-reading that locates music and musical practice as central to not only colonial epistemicide, but also to the re‐engineering of Africans into subjects of empire through projects of careful ethnomusicology and brutal missionary cultural disarmament. He argues that sonic engineering was key to colonial state making.

Biography

Mhoze Chikowero is an Associate Professor of African History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is product of the University of Zimbabwe, where he did his undergraduate studies in economic history before doing a Ph.D. at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is a past American Council of Learned Societies Charles Ryskamp Fellow, a Research Fellow at Leiden University, Affiliate of both the Black Studies Department and the Theatre and Dance Departments at UCSB, where he is also an advisor on the Center for Black Studies Research, the Promise Scholars Program and the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music. Chikowero’s first book, African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (Indiana University Press, 2015), won the 2016 J.H. Kwabena Nketia Book Award. He is currently working on two book manuscripts, the first titled The Military Entertainment Complex: Music, Media and State Making in Zimbabwe, and Tool of Empire, Technology of Self-Liberation: Radio Broadcasting in Colonial Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.For more on Mhoze click here

Contact Phone Number