Making Sense of the Archives: A Digital Exhibit on the Hemispheric Work of Delia, Manuel, and George

Abstract

How can the curation of a digital exhibit amplify the voices of underrepresented scholars? With my research I aim to unbury, understand, and amplify the voices of Afro-Colombian artists, activists, and scholars, Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella. For this, I focus on the collaborations between these Afro-Colombian siblings and U.S. ethnomusicologist George List - former faculty and director of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.

This exhibit is the starting point of my dissertation project which examines how hemispheric dialogues contributed to the construction of the discipline of ethnomusicology. A field was formalized in the United States, but that was (and continues to be) constructed from reverberations, resonances, and echoes of intellectual thinking from the hemisphere (and the globe).

Indiana University houses two collections from George List: one resides at the Indiana University Archives and the other at the Archives of Traditional Music. In them, multiple field notes, sound recordings, photographs, video recordings, and correspondence reside. The memories, histories, and voices contained in these repositories can shed light on how the ideas and work of Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella were key in the construction of List’s scholarship on Colombian music.

In this short presentation, I will explain my process for unburying, understanding (or making sense), and amplifying the voices of these two Afro-Colombian scholars.I aim to reflect on the “behind the scenes” of the construction of the first prototype of a digital exhibit that showcases materials living in the physical archives.