Dr Angela Impey
B.Mus (Cape Town) BA Hons (KwaZulu Natal) PhD (Indiana)
Overview
Department of Music
Lecturer in Ethnomusicology
Centre for Gender Studies
Member
- Name:
- Dr Angela Impey
- Email address:
- ai6@soas.ac.uk
- Telephone:
- 020 7898 4433
- Fax:
- 020 7898 4699
- Address:
- SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG - Building:
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Office No:
- 518
- Office Hours:
- Term 2 - Wednesdays 3-5pm
Teaching
Programmes Convened
Courses Taught
Research
I am currently involved in two research projects. The first examines the politics of place, its position in local memories, and its foundation in spatial practices in the borderlands of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. More specifically, it focuses on the ways in which mobilities and gender intersect in a landscape that has been dramatically reconfigured by transboundary conservation development. The research builds on narratives inspired by the revival of mouth-bows and the jews harp – instruments once performed by young women to accompany walking songs, but remembered now by elderly women only – and explores how meanings given to gendered mobilities through sound, song and performance inflect local experiences of land, spatiality and belonging. The research crucially seeks ways in which memories invoked through sounding in place and motion may provide witness to land and conservation policy in the attempt to realise a more culturally and economically apposite reimagining of the southern African borderlandscape.
The second project, entitled ‘Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song’, and funded by the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ programme, is conducted in collaboration with the Department of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. It focuses on suprasegmental features in four Dinka dialect clusters in Southern Sudan, and investigates how song systems interact with the unique combinations of tone, length and voice quality specifications of the language. The project also seeks to better understand Dinka song-making as a historically, socially and politically embedded system both within Sudan and the diaspora. [http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/nilotic]
Expertise
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Available for
- Radio
- Special Study Programmes
- Short Term Consultancy
Regional Expertise
- Africa
Country Expertise
- Botswana
- Ethiopia
- Mozambique
- South Africa
- Sudan
- Swaziland
- Zimbabwe
Languages
- Zulu
Publications
Book Chapters
Impey, Angela (2011) 'Songs of the In-Between: Remembering in the Land that Memory Forgot.' In: Peddie, Ian, (ed.), Popular Music and Human Rights, Volume II: World Music. Ashgate Press. (Ashgate popular and folk music series.)
Impey, Angela (2005) 'Culture, Conservation and Community Reconstruction: Explorations in Advocacy Ethnomusicology in the Dukuduku Forests, Northern KwaZulu Natal.' In: Post, Jennifer, (ed.), Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 401-411.
Articles
Impey, Angela (2013) 'Keeping in Touch via Cassette: Tracing Dinka Songs from Cattle Camp to Transnational Audio-Letter.' Journal of African Cultural Studies . (Forthcoming)
Impey, Angela (2013) 'Songs of Mobility and Belonging: Gender, Spatiality and the Local in Southern Africa’s Transfrontier Conservation Development.' Interventions: Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, Special Issue Indigenous Performance . (Forthcoming)
Impey, Angela and Dovey, Lindiwe (2010) 'African Jim: Sound, Politics, and Pleasure in Early ‘Black’ South African Cinema.' Journal of African Cultural Studies .
Impey, Angela (2007) 'Pathways of Song: Re-voicing Women's Landscapes in the Maputaland Borderlands.' Agenda. Feminist Media, 73 . pp. 102-16.
Impey, Angela (2007) 'Sound, memory and dis/placement: Exploring sound, song and performance as oral history in the southern African borderlands.' Oral History Journal, 36 (1). pp. 33-44.
Impey, Angela (2006) 'Musical Constructions of Place: Linking Music to Environmental Action in the St Lucia Wetlands.' Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, 23 . pp. 92-106.
Impey, Angela (2006) 'Sounding Place in the Western Maputaland Borderlands.' Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, 3 . pp. 55-79.
Impey, Angela (2002) 'Culture, Conservation and Community Reconstruction: Explorations in Participatory Action Research and Advocacy Ethnomusicology in the Dukuduku Forests, Northern KwaZulu Natal (South Africa).' Yearbook for Traditional Music, 34 . pp. 9-24.
Book Reviews
Impey, Angela (2010) 'Review of Jürgen Schöpf, 'The Serankure and Music in Tlôkweng, Botswana'. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2008.' The World of Music . (Forthcoming)
Impey, Angela (2009) 'Review of Mark Slobin (ed.), 'Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music'. Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.' Ethnomusicology Forum, 18 (1). pp. 170-172.
Impey, Angela (2005) 'Review of Christine Lucia (ed.), 'The World of South African Music. A Reader'. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005.' Ethnomusicology Forum, 16 (2). pp. 343-345.
