Composition and/as postcolonial shame: Philip Miller’s REwind: a cantata for voice, tape, and testimony

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article engages the aporias that arise at the intersection of postcolonial aesthetics, trauma and ethics through a consideration of Philip Miller’s REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony, composed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Following an introduction of REwind, I briefly touch on the creative instrumentalisation of testimony before considering the lengths to which Miller went to replicate an ethic of reconciliation as it had been instituted by the TRC. What I uncover is an exemplary victim-centred ethics, deployed by Miller, which closely mirrors that of the TRC. Yet, REwind is riven with incommensurabilities, from its white reception to the seminal musical moment that sounds the testimony of Eunice Miya against a musical gesture that signifies convention and cliché. To make sense of these, I turn to the work of Timothy Bewes to enable a framing of REwind in terms of postcolonial shame and incommensurability. That is, I follow Bewes in reading the “difficulties and infelicities” of the text, ”not along a continuum of evaluative aesthetic criteria, but rather as instances of inevitable failure–the inevitable failure of postcolonial aesthetics to meet adequately the imperatives of postcolonial ethics.