SOAS Public Music Research Seminar Series: Pan-Africanism and Musical Transnationalism in the Art and Music of Nii Noi Nortey

The SOAS Public Music Research Seminar Series is a valuable forum for ethnomusicology and related fields in London, bringing rising and established scholars to share innovative music research with SOAS audiences. 

Events on the series are free to attend, public, and are available via Zoom (ID: 987 3135 9111​ Password: MgmE808yH5)

Abstract

In Western academic jazz scholarship and Black music studies, Africa is characterized by a severe interplay of exclusion and exoticization. That is, the continuous history of Africa’s relationship with jazz has been largely occluded while the idea and imagination that Africa is the primitive and originary source of the Black diaspora remains pervasive. 

This perspective is conspicuous in many undergraduate syllabi on jazz history wherein Africa is accorded no meaningful place in jazz beyond the middle passage, American plantations, and Congo Square. Within such a framework, Africa exists merely as the static and premodern antecedent of the Black diaspora, thereby affirming the Eurocentric colonial perspective that African people are without history and outside of modernity itself. 

In this presentation, Samuel Boateng offers an alternate view about African modernity by situating Africa as a coeval part of the African diaspora rather than just its origins. He argues that the transnational musical encounters and political activism of Africans across the diaspora are indicative of the continuous agency of African people in the world today and that Africa’s participation in jazz and Black musics is an ongoing process of modern global encounter saturated by negotiations, feedbacks, friction and mutual dialogues. Using ethnographic, historical, and audio-visual sources, Samuel Boateng maps the sonic resonance of African modernity and anti-colonial resistance by focusing on the intersections of jazz, migration, and Afrodiasporic solidarities in the life of Ghanaian artist, multi-instrumentalist, sculptor, and Pan-Africanist, Nii Noi Nortey. As a multi-instrumentalist, sculptor, and Pan-Africanist, Nortey articulates a decolonial perceptive about African subjectivity that champions Africa as a constitutive part of the modern world and an instigator of knowledges that shape life on both sides of the Atlantic.

Speaker

Samuel Boateng is a Career Development Research Fellow in Music at St John’s College, Oxford.  An ethnomusicologist, award-winning jazz pianist and composer, filmmaker, playwright, and visual artist, his research draws from the intersections of music, migration, Atlantic history, and decolonial activism across the African diaspora, and has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Joseph Walsh Endowed Scholarship in Music, and the Andrew Mellon Humanities Engage Project at the University of Pittsburgh where he received his PhD.

Image: Fey Marin (Unsplash)