Reclaiming the Lore and Anti-Preservation Practices: On the Work of African American Music Collectors

Abstract: From the late 19th century, there was an intensive movement and effort on the part of African-descent music collectors to trace and study Black musical expression on a diasporic scale. The music and sounds they heard and the individuals and communities they met contributed to their attempts to make sense of their shared past and present. This talk will offer a different mapping of the field by bringing to the fore and celebrating the radical practices of African American collectors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Willis Laurence James, and Lorenzo Dow Turner. By playing and contextualising songs and recordings they made in the US and the African Diaspora during the 20th century, I will discuss their innovative methods of collecting, performing and (non) archiving sonic expressions and how their collecting became means to redress rupture with past generations and renew intergenerational practices of cultural memory.

Bio: Dr Ellie Armon Azoulay, is a cultural historian who is precariously employed on a fixed-term contract as a Lecturer in Modern US History at Newcastle University. She has a PhD in American Studies and MRes in Exhibition Studies. She is working on her first monograph, Reclaiming the Lore: African American Music Collectors, Refusal and Anti-Preservationist Practices which explores the collecting, performative and educational work of African American collectors from the late 19th century. Her new research project Diasporic Imaginations: Music Collectors of the Black Atlantic, consider how musical performance and its documentation were critical practices used to resist colonial and imperial legacies and to grapple with the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade. Her research and pedagogy were formed by her diverse career(s) and experiences, ranging from research, curatorial work, art criticism, and DJing.