Global Asia Colloquium
May 10, 2024, 4-7pm, 53 Washington Square South, Room 701
Sumangala Damodaran
Afroasian Musical Imaginaries – Precolonial Imprints in Contemporary Musics
Abstract: There is now a large and burgeoning scholarship around precolonial AfroAsian connections and how such long term links have impacted how societies have emerged and the resultant cultural formations within them. If we turn to music and associated performance forms, similarities and various traces of such longue duree interactions can be observed that allow us to uncover historical connections between parts of the two continents in ways that have not been pointed out before. The talk will present examples of such musical forms and traditions along long-term migratory routes and also point out the role of historical memory and emotional registers in the performance of such musics on the two continents. I will also discuss methodological issues that arise and need to be pushed in undertaking such an exercise.
Bio: Sumangala Damodaran is an academician and musician, whose experience spans teaching and research in Economics, Development Studies and Popular Music Studies. She has taught in Delhi University and Ambedkar University Delhi in India over a period of three decades and is presently Director, Gender and Economics with the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) and Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Washington at Seattle. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s has resulted in a book titled “The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the IPTA” and an album titled ‘Songs of Protest’ and she has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in different parts of the world. She has collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa as a founder member of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, which has produced six music albums and has also directed a multi-institutional project around Music and Migration in Precolonial Afro-Asia from 2016 until the present, which has resulted in two musical productions and a book titled ‘Maps of Sorrow’(2023).
May 10, 2024
Time: 4-7pm
Presenter: Sumangala Damodaran
Location: 53 Washington Square South, Room 701