Browsing by Author "Dash, Kathyayini"

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    Mapping affective infra-structures: engaging pre-colonial embodied histories of grief through performance
    (2026) Dash, Kathyayini; Matchett, Sara; Sitas, Ari
    This thesis explores the relationship between sound, body and history. It proposes the concept of affective infra-structures that emerges out of an engagement with the idea of embodied histories and explores musical entrances into historiography. I draw from my pilot fieldwork for the RAA Project1 and use the Wayee, a musical system built on the lament, practiced by a semi-nomadic community of buffalo herders from Bhagaadiya, Kachchh, Gujarat, India, as a nodal point that connects to all the propositions emerging throughout the course of my thesis. I suggest that the Wayee enables and operates within a sonic infra-structure of grief that works as a modality through which events are remembered and shared. In this way, materials like the Wayee can be perceived as historical-musical codes, that become a means of mapping transnational and transcontinental memories and possibly even deriving old musical linkages and histories of migration. These histories lie in the way they are told; in the way they are sung and it is these infra-structures that make such histories apparent. This Practice-as Research (PaR) thesis comprises of two inter connected components—a written thesis and a performance event+exhibition. The written thesis seeks to arrive at methods and frameworks through which historiographical methods and research can be interwoven with performance practice. The first chapter discusses pre-colonial pasts and embodied histories and considers how certain forms of performance like the Wayee, become a modality of remembering where the sonic medium holds a unique capacity of installing the past in the present. The second chapter discusses nomadic histories and opens out the body as a site in which pasts are kept alive through a performative medium like the sonic (the lament being an aspect). The third chapter provides a sonic vocabulary to be used as an academic hearing-aid, making musical perception available to the unversed, not just the musically adept, and introduces the concept of infra-structures. Chapter Four uses Sara Ahmad's notion of affective economies and Karmen Mackendrick's idea around the fleshy materiality of the sonic to explicate affective infra-structures through which histories that appear to be ‘lost' show themselves. The final chapter summarizes the written thesis and includes a introduction and link to the thesis performance and exhibition as well as a reflection on it. The aim of the performance event is to explore the shape of grief, and the subject of synchronicities and departures through a transcontinental musical collaborative exploration of the maahaul (musical atmosphere). The exhibition will include artworks produced during the doctoral process and aural/visual citations, that have led to the insights collected in the written thesis. I wish to re-center feeling, and focus on how affective infra-structures of grief are spread across Afro-Eur-Asian lives in ways that enable us to recognize the lament not just as a moving expression of deep sorrow, but as an empowering and powerful modality through which transnational and transcontinental solidarities were forged, are remembered, and can be rebuilt today.