Keeping in touch via cassette

Tracing Dinka songs from cattle camp to transnational audio-letter

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2172995
AutoresAngela Impey (University of London)
Ano2013
Volume25
Fascículo2
Páginas197-210
Data de publicação2013-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of African Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1369-6815 • E-ISSN: 1469-9346
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13696815.2013.775038
OpenAlexW1972176097
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11
Referências citadas12

This article explores Dinka songs as poetic autobiography, focusing in particular on their composition and circulation as audio-letters between South Sudan and the global Dinka diaspora. Drawing on current debates on mobility and belonging, the article explores how a tradition of personal song making, which is rooted in a culture of pastoralism and localized mobilities, has been repackaged to accommodate population dispersal across continents and cultures. While ‘big’ mobilities (transacted by civil war) have caused Dinka societies to expand and grow, the article considers how audio-letters simultaneously bring clan groups together through a combination of old cultural forms and new geographies and concerns. Through the analysis of two Dinka Bor songs, the article explores how the immediacy and potency inflected in the sonic and poetic convention of the genre nourishes Dinka social and spatial relations and helps to define and redefine their pasts and futures. It concludes with a reflection on the ‘affiliative power’ of the cassette, which, despite increasing access to digital technologies, has remained the song carrier of choice, and has thus become implicated in the complexity of connections, identifications and intimacies of this contemporary global cultural practice

Art · Clan · Diaspora · Immediacy · Literature · Mobilities · Population · Sociology · Anthropology · Diverse Musicological Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Music History and Culture · Gender Studies · History