Ronald Radano
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of African Cultural Studies and Music, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Spring 2019

Ronald Radano is Professor of African Cultural Studies and Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a senior fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities from 2013 to 2017. After studying music composition at Rowan University, he completed his PhD in musicology at the University of Michigan. Radano then spent a few years at the Smithsonian Institution, where he researched American music and helped plan the launch of the Jazz Masterworks Editions publication series. Radano’s main area of specialization is US black music as a historical phenomenon and in its transnational circulation.

 

Radano is the author of two award-winning books: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (Chicago, 1993) and Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, 2003). He is co-editor of Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000) and Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke, 2016). He has published widely, including articles in Musical Quarterly, Daedalus, Critical Inquiry, Modernism/Modernity, Radical History Review, and boundary 2, and co-edits two book series, Refiguring American Music (Duke) and Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. A Guggenheim Fellow in 1997, Radano has received recent grants from the German Academic Exchange Service and Mellon Foundation, and fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and the Rockefeller Foundation’s initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.  Work initially begun at Harvard will result in the publication of his forthcoming study in music aesthetics, Secret Animation of Black Music: A Theory of Value.

Project Description

Re-Animating the Archive: Phonographic Excavations of African Coloniality

At the Academy, Radano will launch a new project, which will focus on the colonial-era African recordings of the Phonogram Archive at Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum. In 1999, these phonographic recordings, dating from 1900 to 1953, were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. (From 1944 to 1991, around 90 percent of the collection was held in the Soviet Union.) Radano plans to undertake a close analysis of the roughly 2,500 phonographic cylinders of African performances produced in Africa and in Berlin before 1918. Although the recordings typically represented African music as exoticized and racial in character, they can, Radano argues, help us to rethink the history of black music as a transnational concept, linking Germany and Africa to the US and the world.

Academy Activities

26 Mar 19
Black Music’s Recorded Afterlives Musicology

Andrew W. Mellon Lecture in the Humanities

Black Music’s Recorded Afterlives

Ronald Radano discusses the German archive of African music recordings from the early twentieth century.

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06 Jun 19
Scratching against the Kaboom and Blare of Trumpets Humanities

Andrew W. Mellon Discussion

Scratching against the Kaboom and Blare of Trumpets

Inaugural Andrew W. Mellon fellows Rosalind Morris and Ronald Radano in discussion with South African composers Thuthuka Sibisi and Philip Miller.

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26 Mar 19

Black Music’s Recorded Afterlives

If colonial writing robbed Africa of its “spirit”—as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’O suggested—what do we make of that other Western, technological intervention: the sound recorder? Around 1900, a series of German travelers undertook their own kind of “language” invasion consist ...

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