The Sonic Imaginaries of Africa in German Cinema (1930–2000)

Africa has a sound. It circulates in commercial media such as German cinema and television and conveys effective narratives about the continent as a homogeneously constructed country, but ideas of the German Heimat also blend into it. In musicology and its neighboring disciplines, little attention has been paid to the central role that music plays in the multi-layered history of imaginary Africa and as part of the colonial unconscious. Along a cross-section of German-language film and television history (fictional and non-fictional), the emergence and development of audiovisual representations of Africa are examined: Decades of colonial nostalgia and the imperial fantasies of fascism are examined critically, as are TV series of the so-called Africanized Heimatfilm. What is completely new in this project is the inclusion of anthropological material in the analysis of film music, which is based on empirical archive work. The analysis of the film music will therefore, on the one hand, work out the continuities and historical variants of the sonically imaginary Africa. On the other hand, the production process will also be examined. Questions about the origin of the source material in the archives (including the Lautarchiv Berlin), some of which was created in and through colonial contexts, will be critically examined from an ethical point of view. Furthermore, the investigation of the interaction between the production and reception of media and cultural images of Africa through the marketing of film music is part of the research design. This project aims to bring film music as one of the most powerful popular music genres of the 20th century into an exchange with the broad interdisciplinary research on (post-)colonialism and audiovisual culture as well as on sound history and sound heritage. And it will make a cultural studies contribution to understanding the mutual affinities between colonialism and homeland ideology.