ACT Research Seminar: ‘Sounding Colonial Incarceration: Pedagogy, Hymns, Resistance’

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This paper considers the colonial hymn as a means of negotiating biopolitical strategies of control in the concentration camps of the South African War (1899–1902). In these spaces of enforced ‘congregating’, communal hymn singing emerged as a form of theological and aesthetic confrontation at the very moment that the modern concentration camp was invented. Eye-witness accounts of prison life in Afrikaner concentration camps, for example, reveal that the singing of Dutch-language psalm tunes and hymns occurred spontaneously at moments of personal and communal grief, as well as more formally in concentration camp schools. Drawing specifically on systems of concentration camp pedagogy – such as the teaching of English-language hymns within camp schools – I propose that during the South African War the concentration camp became a heightened site of negotiating spaces of enforced ‘congregating’. Pedagogical approaches to the colonial hymn, in this context, became a sonic means of responding to, reinforcing and resisting new, racialised forms of mass incarceration. In this way, the colonial hymn both embodies and contests early twentieth-century forms of ethnic incarceration as biopolitical control, offering a way to reimagine the genre of the hymn as a negotiation between the colonised and the coloniser; and between mass conformity and the agency of collective resistance. 

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Meeting ID: 970 4197 3598

Passcode: 627701

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