[On October 18, 2019 Professor Louise Meintjes (Music and Cultural Anthropology, Duke) gave a lecture titled “Audible Africanity: Ululation in Popular Music” at the School of Music. Below is a response by Ian Nutting (Ethnomusicology)] Schizophonic Mimetic Loops and Soundings from the Global South Written by Ian Nutting (Ethnomusicology) Drawing on the ethnographic work done for her 2017 book Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (winner of the 2018 Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology and the 2018 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology), ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes is beginning to explore a sounded phenomenon known as ululation, a high-pitched trilling heard in a variety of forms across a multiplicity of particular cultural contexts in the Global South. Meintjes has recently written a chapter on the potential significance of ululation in the 2019 volume Remapping Sound Studies, but in her presentation at UIUC, she was more interested in teasing out the global feedback loops of Zulu ululation in popular music. Whether you know it or not, you are most likely no stranger to ululation. Listen to the ululating in this scene from Black Panther, or check out the last 30 seconds of Pray For Me by The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar off the album inspired by the movie. Meintjes pointed to a set of EDM patches for sale called “Zulu Warriors vol. 1” that contains more than 50 ululation loops, both “wet and dry” (with and without effects). In these EDM patches, the sound of ululation has been ripped from its particular culturally meaningful context and sampled, spliced, looped, distorted, and reverbed across the globe, in many cases without consideration for the particular Zulu bodies that sounded the ululation. In effect, a particular kind of ululation, or ululating aesthetic, has been abstracted, commodified, and canned as the exotic sound of Africanity. This separation and recontextualization is a paradigmatic example of what ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Steven Feld called “shizophonic mimesis.” Meintjes described ululation in the context of a Zulu men’s song and dance called ngoma, the performance of which is a form of participatory community politics. During ngoma, ululation is performed mostly by mature women, sometimes simply on the sidelines of the men’s performance, but other times as the women dance up alongside men who are singing and dancing well; ululation is always something done for or on behalf of – ululation is always relational. It works as a kind of gendered technology of presence, used by mature women in the community to claim participation by marking and making the form of the performance. The intimacy of aesthetics and politics is obvious here. In a 1990 seminal article, Meintjes traced the mediation of musical meaning in Paul Simon’s album Graceland. She returned to Graceland in this presentation, drawing attention to the way Africanity was sounded in the beginning of the track “Homeless” through ululation and other calls for participation. Here, a song recorded in London, mixed in New York, and consumed all over the world, uses particular Zulu sounds to stand in for African-ness. As abstracted and commodified Africanity, ululation as a heard phenomenon loses its contextual political power. But, as often happens in cases such as this, the very circulation of ululation required by global capitalism provides an exploitable contradiction of sorts. Meintjes went on to show that the use of ululation in popular music as Africanity is not simply a South African export for international audiences; the use of ululation in popular music loops back from whence it came. Musicians in South Africa have used ululation and other sound effects in their own locally produced and consumed music. When music is produced by South African Zulu for a local audience (with the hope of potentially making it big internationally, of course), as opposed to being produced explicitly for an international audience or dance club scene, ululation and other sound effects are not used less, but much more, which creates a contextually meaningful high-density aesthetic of collective participation. Meintjes showed this by examining recordings from the Umzansi Zulu Dancers and a local musician and producer named Siyazi. The density of sound changed when recordings were locally produced, and ululation has been used heavily in South Africa by Zulu producers to sound their particular Africanity. As this is the beginning of a new major research project, the Q&A was especially generative. Discussion included comparing ululation to other kinds of performative interjection and women’s practices of keening and lamenting, questioning how Zulu women conceive of this practice, and tying this practice to other potentially similar instances of ululation in India the Levant (or even Xena’s battle cry). At this stage in the research process, Meintjes admitted there are any number of potential directions for this work. By continuing to focus her work on the sounds of South Africa and their aesthetic and political meanings, Meintjes is showing the importance of intersectionality and the Global South for the future of sound studies. Examining sounds as always already gendered, racialized, and part of various systems of power like global capitalism, is imperative for the field if it is to have any chance of avoiding the mere reinscription of the epistemological (and actual) violence of colonialism and Euro-centric thinking. Studying ululation, as relation, is a timely project as sound studies and musicology turn to globality while attempting to retain difference and particularity. The schitzophonic mimetic loops of ululation Meintjes elucidated are a great example of what sticking with the soundings of the Global South can do for our understanding of meaning and power.