Overlooked and sublime

The songs of the mitungu traditional dance of the Tumbuka-Ngoni people of the Rumphi and Mzimba districts in northern Malawi form part of a vibrant poetic genre that has remained undocumented ever since the dance first appeared in the mid-1960s. Not only has the genre been deemed unworthy of literary study, it has also been disregarded by the ruling classes, who tend to be uncomfortable with the frank discourse of the songs. Through an analysis of songs tape-recorded from various areas in the two districts, this article demonstrates that mitungu songs are works of art in the sense that formalist literary theorist, Viktor Shklovsky (1994: 270), defines art, namely ‘works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible’. The article also shows that mitungu composers exploit linguistic features which, as averred by the classical literary critic, Longinus, make for the sublime in literature. It is argued that being overlooked by the ruling classes frees mitungu from political incorporation. This enables the genre to express the spontaneous culture of the ordinary people, thereby making mitungu one of Malawi's most faithful expressions of a people's ethos and world view

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dance · Sociology · Sublime · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Multilingual Education and Policy

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