In 2003, South African rap collective Cashless Society released the single “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2)” on their debut album African Raw Material, Volume One. The track promoted Cashless Society’s impressions of millennial technologies amid the impending cashless, paperless, and wireless future (Hitchcock 2009; Ice and Demy 1996; Kupetz 2008). Moreover, “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2)” contrasted indigenous South African San performance practices with imminent digital changes.

Cashless Society emphasized that the impetus for “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2)” was Saartjie Baartman, a San woman exhibited in nineteenth century European shows. Beginning in 1810, Baartman was labelled the “Hottentot Venus,” a racialized title associated with the exoticization, fetishization, and sexualization of her body by cartoonists, comparative anatomists, managers, satirists, and voyeuristic showgoers (Holmes 2007; Magubane 2001; Nanda 2019). “Hottentot,” a pejorative Dutch term associated with characteristics of San languages, evolved into a legislative classification applied to the San. By reinforcing the word, and centering Baartman and aspects of San culture on “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2),” Cashless Society juxtaposed her exhibition with modernistic lyrical descriptions (Mashile 2019).

This presentation examines memory and modernity in Cashless Society’s song “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2).” It is based on artist interviews as well as lyrical, musical, and video analyses. The presentation investigates depictions of San performance practices and Saartjie Baartman introduced in “Hottentot Hop (Bantu 1, 2).” In so doing, it explores the significance of San culture and Baartman in Cashless Society’s lyrical content and music at the start of the new millennium.

In 1947, Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki dance hall opened in Opelousas, Louisiana. Following decades of success that featured prominent zydeco musicians such as Clifton Chenier, the venue closed in 2015. However, in December 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture invested $100,000 in the Zydeco Historical Preservation Society to develop a restoration plan for Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki as a preservation site. Throughout southwest Louisiana, dance halls like Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki provided popular communal sites animated by music and dance. Although regional venues have diminished in social, cultural, and economic significance in recent decades, they continue to function as important sites of memory. Whether patrons remember the performance of captivating music, stomping their feet on wood floors, or the verbal exchange of local news, people engage with sound to express their belonging to shared spaces of dance halls. Drawing from heritage studies, I consider the interconnection of sound and memory in heritage construction processes. I propose the following research questions: Why is sound integral to remembering dance hall experiences? How does remembering those experiences reactivate sites via community participation and preservation efforts? Through archival research in the University of Louisiana-at-Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies and oral history interviews in southwest Louisiana, I argue that dance hall patrons use sonic storytelling to sustain lived experiences of dance hall culture and imagine spaces of belonging that aim to reinvigorate those lifeways. This paper provides insight into how sound studies and heritage studies can interconnect to understand and support similar preservation efforts of social spaces.

Folk musical instruments used in Adivasi festivals and rituals in Assam, India, are dynamic sites of cultural production. The Adivasi community comprises people who migrated from central India to Assam in the 19th-20th centuries, settling in British-run tea estates where they served as indentured laborers. In post-colonial Assam, Adivasi musical production entails a constant negotiation between maintaining cultural continuity through invoking collective social memories of migration and connections with central India, and engaging in cultural reinvention through assimilation with ethnic groups indigenous to Assam. Inspired by a combination of vital materialism (Bennett 2009) and Bate’s notion of “thing power” (2012), I examine folk musical instruments as active agents in the erasure and reinvention of Adivasi traditions, throughout their various life-stages including the collection of raw materials for their construction, their use in sonic production and meaning-making, and their eventual discard. I ask, how does the material, sonic, and symbolic presence of musical instruments reassert Adivasi historical consciousness and memories of migration? How does the construction and discard of instruments adapt to changing socio-cultural and ecological conditions of Assam? Do the musical instruments and their sonic productions challenge the idea of a singular Adivasi musical sensibility, suggesting cultural assimilation with other ethnic groups? I answer these questions using oral histories of Adivasi folk musicians and instrument-makers, complemented by participant observation in festivals and rituals. By acknowledging the agency of musical instruments, this work aligns itself with the Adivasi animistic belief system that dictates service towards human and non-human agents alike.