This talk brings to the table tailings of a new project on the struggle for “New African Music” (so-called by the Union of Southern African Artists from 1953).

In it, I follow the railway tracks west from Johannesburg Park Station through Langlaagte and the junction to Phomolong/Orlando, moving through Durban Deep/Roodepoort and looking north beyond Krugersdorp/Mogale City to the now “Cradle of Humankind.” Chronologically, the project begins with apartheid legislation and the Defiance Campaign, or rather the visit of the University of California African Expedition to the Witwatersrand Goldfields in 1948. (Besides the paleo-anthropological quest for human origins, the expedition made massed recordings of “African Music” – in search of the biological and social origins of “humanly organized sound.”) The project ends with the Soweto Uprisings, or rather the repercussions of 1976 on the music-educational work of Urbania Bebe Mothopeng. Urbania was the wife of Zephania (“the Lion of Azania,” Pan-Africanist leader and choral conductor) who ran a music conservatory (was it a front?) out of their three-roomed house in Orlando West.

Moving across emergent music industry genre categories in this period – and between period theorizations of “multi-racialism,” “non-racialism,” and “racial capitalism” – I work toward an account of “New African Music” that goes beyond the ethnomusicological redefinition of music tout court as “valued activity, medium, source, or tactic for political expression and social mobilization” (as per John Blacking’s 1973 How Musical is Man?). Instead, I take struggles over “music” as ground zero for making determinations about “man” in view of a teetering global US dollar-gold global monetary system. My topic is the extractive musicographic search for “Man as Music Maker” in a political ecology where humankind was drawn violently from rock: music figured as an art of humanity, and humanity recognized only in the face of its brutal opposite.

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Speaker Biography: Dr. James Davies is Professor of Music, Director of the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, co-editor of the UChicago Press book series New Material Histories of Music, and scholar with musicological interests and expertise in the long nineteenth century. He authored the books Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817-1913 (UChicago: 2023) and Romantic Anatomies of Performance (California: 2014), co-editing Sound Knowledge, 1789-1851 (UChicago, 2017). Recent publications include ‘Kautschukmelodie: Cabinda Rubber, Epistemic Murk, Song Properties,’ Unsound Supplies: Extractivism and the Provenance of Auditory Technologies, eds. Gribenski, Pantalony, and Tkaczyk (Oxford, 2025) and “Cosmopoiesis: Stories Sung of the Equatorial Gulf of Guinea, 1817,” Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Media and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Mukhopadhyay and McMurray (Oxford, 2023).