Mapping affective infra-structures: engaging pre-colonial embodied histories of grief through performance

Dash, Kathyayini

Mapping affective infra-structures: engaging pre-colonial embodied histories of grief through performance

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Centre for Film and Media Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

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.