Novak will complete his new book exploring the archival counterhistory of popular music and the global impact of physical sound media
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded a prestigious fellowship to David Novak, associate professor of ethnomusicology and director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at UC Santa Barbara.
With the fellowship's support, Novak will complete his manuscript "Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music." The project explores the collection, preservation and digital redistribution of physical sound recordings in emergent archives across the Global South and beyond.
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with archivists, collectors and filmmakers in Indonesia, Cambodia, Kurdistan, the United Kingdom and the United States, Novak’s research focuses on transnational subjects who use repositories of physical sound media — primarily records and cassettes — to represent diasporic and decolonial auralities that challenge hegemonic narratives of musical production.
In dialogue with a broad network of "diggers," artists, activists, collectors and archivists that stretches across Southeast Asia, North America and Europe, the project engages with ongoing critiques of field recording and regional music industries, the historiography of media collections and the online mediation of sonic memory.
"To ‘dig’ a global history of recorded music means many things," Novak writes. "To foster new appreciations of marginalized sounds; to uncover buried historical knowledge; to reevaluate material artifacts and circulate them into new conditions of value in a deeply uneven transnational economy."
Novak plans to extend the Diggers project with a series of public-facing and multi-modal publications that reflect ongoing collaborative efforts with the global scholars, artists, curators and independent practitioners that inform his research.
Header photo: David Novak, associate professor of ethnomusicology, examines a collection of cassette tapes in Istanbul. (Photo by Alexandra Lippman)