Beyond the Digital Return:

New Heritage/s, Sustainability, and the Decolonisation of Music Archives in South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana

Date: 11-12.7.2023

Venue: MAISON FRANCAISE AUDITORIUM – University of Ghana Reginald Amonoo Building, Departments of French and Modern Languages, University of Ghana (first session at J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives)

For more than a decade, as academics, artists, and activists, we’ve been entangled in an increasingly dynamic public discourse on cultural heritage, what could be called the “heritage buzz” (Meyer/van de Port 2018). Evoking a critical discourse on cultural heritage and its terminology of tangible, intangible and living heritage respectively, the workshop targets new heritages specifically in the fields of “digital music heritage,” “popular music heritage,” “Music as Living Heritage & Gendered Heritage, alternative and “unauthorised” heritage, and music/AV-archives/heritage repositories as transforming and “decolonial spaces”.

The workshop also tackles issues of preservation, digitization, repatriation from technical and ethical points of views, as well as heritage community archives/heritage initiatives, seeking to promote “heritage activism”. And how these practices and process are related to intellectual property rights and copyright. How does access to archival/heritage collections affect notions of self and others, reshape identities and historiography? The workshop seeks to provide an opportunity for in-depth exchange, sharing knowledge, and critical reflection on the new concepts and practices involved.

Our workshop seeks to create exchange of cultural experts, performers, activists, and scholars on our research topic and concerns, to conceptualise collaborations across disciplinary fields, to create synergies beneficial to our research endeavours as well as to the practitioners/communities involved. Attended by our research team members and invited participants, it brings together these different voices to discuss the relevance of digital return/repatriation and archival accessibility for digitised content and heritage practices with our research team. We are aiming at creating a critical forum for this subject as well as outreach for the project and the work of the African Studies Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. Apart from thematic sessions and roundtables, there will be an artist talk and/or a music performance.

Link to project