Anthropology/CFCE Seminar: Prof Stephanus Muller (Stellenbosch University)

Beyond the Monument: the Archive, Writing, and the Politics of Form

In 2014, I published Nagmusiek, a three-volume work on the South African composer Arnold van Wyk. Although this book was situated in the terrain of South African art music, its implications extend well beyond the disciplinary bounds of musicology or biography. In this talk I reflect on the writing, making, and digital afterlife of Nagmusiek as a case study in the problem of scale, genre, and disciplinary power in postcolonial intellectual practice.

Written in Afrikaans, Nagmusiek emerged out of an extended engagement with literary and philosophical questions around representation, subjectivity, and historical writing. It was shaped in the creative writing seminar of novelist Marlene van Niekerk and extended through collaborations with designer Oliver Barstow and filmmaker Aryan Kaganof. The result was a book that blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction, scholarship and artefact—prompting, among other things, a literary reception that recognised it simultaneously as biography, archive, metafiction, and historiographical refusal.

This talk does not aim to advocate for Van Wyk’s work as a topic of global concern, but rather, uses the making of Nagmusiek to pose broader questions about how academic writing engages with histories marked by violence, complicity, and aesthetic erasure. I reflect on how a book ostensibly about a white, closeted apartheid-era composer became a medium to interrogate the authority of genre, the monumentality of scholarly form, and the borders between auto/biography and historical fiction. I consider how the book’s multilingualism and aesthetic gestures—material, graphic, typographic—were part of a decolonial manoeuvre that aimed to resist nostalgia while also resisting the total erasure of a complex subject from the post-apartheid cultural field.

Crucially, the afterlife of Nagmusiek extended into the digital realm through the arts-based platform herri, published by the Africa Open Institute. There, the book and the composition it is named after became the object of creative and critical responses from filmmakers, composers, philosophers, and writers, including figures such as Leonard Praeg, Thom Whyman, and Pluto Panoussis. These interventions unfolded in media-rich, nonlinear, and multilingual formats—displacing the authorial centre of the book and reconfiguring its interpretive possibilities.

I present Nagmusiek as an experiment in scholarly and aesthetic method that grapples with questions many in the creative and ethnographic humanities are currently confronting: What does it mean to write with, and not simply about, the archive? How might creative and scholarly forms collaborate in non-hierarchical ways? Can we reimagine textuality—on the page, and in the digital realm—as a shared space of experimentation in the aftermath of disciplinary hegemony?

In this lecture, I explore how Nagmusiek became more than a book: a network of textual, filmic and digital relations that continues to probe the limits of authorship, historical knowing, and the political afterlives of sound and silence.

Prof Stephanus Muller is a musicologist, writer, and founding director of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University. He holds a DPhil in Historical Musicology from the University of Oxford and has previously studied at the University of Pretoria, the University of South Africa, and Stellenbosch University. A leading figure in South African music studies, he has received numerous awards for his scholarship and creative work, including the Chancellor’s Award for Research and multiple national literary prizes. He is the author of Nagmusiek (2014), a genre-defying work of biographical fiction, and co-editor of several landmark volumes on South African composers and musical life. His research integrates historiography, archival work, and experimental creative practice, with a sustained focus on decolonial approaches to music and knowledge production in Africa.

****The event is co-organised with the Centre for Creative Ethnography at QUB.****