Perspective on "ReSoundings": Julie L. McGee
Julie L. McGee, Curator of African American Art, Associate Professor, Black American Studies
Perspectives is a series of informal afternoon discussions led by curators and invited faculty about the objects, exhibitions, and ideas on display in University Museums galleries. Scheduled for your lunch break, these varied, short and informal noontime talks offer an introduction to each exhibition as well as time for discussion.
About ReSoundings
Sound is an archeological and navigational tool for exploring the richly complicated terrain of South African history for artists Garth Erasmus and Siemon Allen. Through their work in ReSoundings we enter a world of South African chronologies and heritage deeply rooted and specific yet resonant beyond national borders.
Allen’s installation is inspired by his on-going analysis of the beloved Afrikaans folksong, “Daar Kom Die Alibama (There Comes the Alabama).” Albeit contested, its purported namesake is the eponymous Confederate raider, CSS Alabama, which docked in the Cape in 1863 and 1864. For Allen, an Afrikaans folksong associated with maritime trade and the Confederacy has connected the artist to his port of birth in Durban, South Africa and his present home in Richmond, Virginia. Allen brings visual order to interrelated histories and conflated trajectories that include South Africa’s maritime and colonial histories, the American Civil War and the transatlantic slave trade.
Similarly, Erasmus’s work reminds us that South African history did not begin with Apartheid or even with the entry of the Dutch into the Cape Colony (now Cape Town) in April of 1652. Rather, its cultural, linguistic, creative and artistic legacies are as old as humankind. Since the 1980s, Erasmus has been deeply invested in the life and cultural heritage of South Africa’s indigenous inhabitants, among them Sara Baartman and Autshumato. Their histories inspire Erasmus’s sound art, seen and heard in ReSoundings.
ReSoundings forms part of the broader University of Delaware Creative Campus grant-funded project, Cape ReSoundings, sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center (IHRC).
Monday, October 5, 2015 at 12:15pm to 1:00pm
Mechanical Hall, Gallery
Mechanical Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19711, USA
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