Browsing by Author "Verghese, Benjamin"

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    Mapping MAPP: jazz pedagogies & praxes of freedom
    (University of the Western Cape, 2025) Verghese, Benjamin
    During its active years, the community arts organisation Musical Action for People’s Power (hereafter MAPP) functioned in a multitude of ways, as a: concert organiser; provider of sound (systems); co-participant in workshops and solidarity events with other community or youth groups and trade unions; but mainly as an “educational body”, which in 1989, semi-formally transitioned into a school for music education, renaming itself Musical Action for People’s Progress. As a pedagogic site, MAPP produced an education through arts practice which undid, in its methodology and practice, apartheid’s segregationist education policies and was deeply embedded in the mass democratic movement and other circuits of comradely organisation(s). Despite its active role, it has no presence in academic literature, its archive of different mediums is sparse, and its impact is not fully understood. This research project maps the network of pedagogies, people, places, and politics of MAPP in an effort to analyse the conditions which led to its formation, the people who contributed to MAPP’s cultural work, and the everyday events and changes during its eight years of activity. In particular, the project asks whether the practices and pedagogies of MAPP through jazz inform a philosophy of art-making as a practice of freedom. It does so through archival and historiographic methodologies based on critical practices of cartography, black study, jazz pedagogy, and DJ scholarship.