Abstract
Christopher James (1952–2008) was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and moved to South Africa in 1974. As a composer, James’s style conflated traditional European musical textures with southern African instrumentation, rhythms and harmonies. This chapter considers the extent to which James’s fluidic sense of national identity influenced and shaped his concept of self, and how this positioning found expression in James’s music. These compositions will be treated less as sources of musical analysis, but rather as archival artefacts used as mechanisms to probe, through the lens of life writing, the question of James’s transnationality. This chapter aims to consider James’s music as a site of expression of a dislocated sense of nationhood, and how this can be understood and positioned within a life-writing framework.
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Röntsch, M. (2020). ‘No Use Calling Yourself South African. South African Is Nothing’: Understanding and Exploring the Concept of Place and Nationhood in the Life and Music of Christopher James. In: Rensen, M., Wiley, C. (eds) Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_5
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