Pan-African Music: A Black Atlantic Dialogue with David Sánchez and Brenda Sisane

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Read more about the Black Archival Imagination Lab:
Music has for centuries been at the heart of the expression of African descendent people globally. In this panel, the eminent Puerto Rican composer and saxophonist David Sánchez – a major figure in contemporary music who consciously pursues the unity of African descendent music – will be in conversation with the South African broadcast journalist Brenda Sisane during her Duke residency. Through the career and musical practice of David Sánchez, this conversation will explore the concept of Pan-African music – bridging genre, nationality and style in thinking about what it is that unites the cultures and aesthetics of African descended people.

The Black Archival Imagination Lab examines how Black experiences have posed problems with regards to representation across imperial encounters. It takes seriously narrative and creative reasoning, and as such, genres such as the novel, poetry, film, photography, sound, critical fabulation and digital spaces in thinking through the idea of the Black archive. A key objective of the Lab is to think through these genres as methodological interventions in understanding what the Black archive is. We do not take the Black archive to be unitary or static but as mutating repertoires in the figuration and preservation of black experience as well as provocations of what the past and future might look like. But we can also think of the Black archive as endangered, erased, made possible as well as constrained by the conditions of dispersal that define Africa and the Black diaspora, past and present.

The Lab is anchored by a graduate seminar, a public seminar series, an edited collection from the seminar series at the University of Cape Town, and archival work from a museum in South Africa. Its co-directors are: Christopher Ouma, Associate Professor of English, and Khwezi Mkhize, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies.

Video edited by Charmaine McKissick-Melton Communications Fellow Micah Edwards, from North Carolina Central University.