Miriam & Me: An Afrogyneglossic Inheritance

Abstract

Addressing the ways African women's voices have been silenced, exoticized, and rendered unintelligible – in the music industry and in scholarship that claims to celebrate Black sound – I draw on voice studies, Black and Africana studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology to identify gaps in existing scholarship and introduce two original concepts. The first, Makeban methodology, identifies co-constitutive strands in the artistic practice of Miriam Makeba – breath and extra-linguistic vocalization, performative translation, linguistic hospitality, circulation and migration as political project, and approximation to jazz – arguing that these constitute a set of repeatable, transferable strategies through which African women artists have negotiated legibility, autonomy, and belonging across disparate cultural terrains. The second, Afrogyneglossia, names the creative practice of layering the voices of African and Afro-diasporic women across time, genre, and geography to resist monolithic representation – an active form of sonic kinship that both honors obscured vocal lineages and asserts the present-tense interventions of voices that follow. Written as a series of four ‘gestures’, rather than conventional chapters, to reflect the deeply embodied and autoethnographic stance of my practice as both artist and author, the essay shifts across varying registers – analytical scholarship, personal memoir, poetry, and curatorial reflection. The first gesture, Makeba as Method, establishes the analytical framework through close readings of Makeba’s practice. The second, Makeba as Memory, shifts into an embodied register to illuminate how Makeban methodology reveals itself in my decade-long, multidisciplinary investigation of Makeba's life and legacy through an original play, studio album, and performances across Western and African stages. The third, Makeba as Map, follows my tracing of Makeba's circulation across mid-twentieth-century Africa, leading to wider considerations of the continent's performing arts heritage and reconstitution of its faltering archive through curatorial and emerging filmmaking practice. Makeba as Mother then closes with a meditation on lineage, inheritance, and the responsibility of those who follow – the sonic kinship shared among contemporary African women artists whose practices carry Makeban methodology forward, consciously or less consciously. This project argues that creative practice is, itself, a mode of theorization. If the literature has no language for Miriam Makeba – the first African artist to achieve global visibility – it has no language for the African women following her, myself included. This dissertation offers that language: methodology rooted in body, voice, silence, and care.