The Recording Studio as Fetish

I am an ethnographer of music and sound, with particular interests in the voice and its mediation, the relationships among body and voice (dance and music/sound), and the ways that artistry and politics intersect. I pay attention to the craft of making music/dance, the finesse of listening to the world, and sensory experience of living and relating through the arts. Focusing on sound and the arts in this social way, my goal is to better understand the perpetuation of injury and injustice on the one hand, and how people imagine enabling futures on the other. I have worked as an ethnographer in state-of-the-art recording studios in Johannesburg, where transnational drives converge with local politics in the production of African popular musics. I continue to work with migrant Zulu singer-dancers and their fans, friends and families in “rural” KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in contexts of exuberant pleasure and a vexed legacy of racialized violence.