This course identifies and considers keywords for the study of contemporary African music and sound. Each week we will foster discussion around a keyword and a constellation of case studies. We will engage with scholarship from across the humanistic disciplines and read authors from on and off the African continent. The sonic practices we will encounter range from Congolese rumba bands to Tunisian trance singers; from loudspeakers atop Nigerian mosques to honk horns from Ghanaian lorries; from listening practices in South African midwifery to Uganda's repatriation of colonial-era sound archives.

By exploring the interconnections between contemporary African sound communities, we will identify and discuss keywords arising in current scholarship, including technologies like the amplifier and the hard drive, spaces like the studio and the city, and analytics like pleasure and hotness. We will also engage with established concepts for the study of postcolonial African cultures, including nationalism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, diaspora, and pan-Africanism. Altogether, this graduate seminar will introduce students to influential concepts in contemporary Africanist scholarship, and ask them to reflect on the stakes and significance of theorizing about African sound.