MATERIAL NARRATION OF NOSTALGIA AND MODALITY IN THE LYRICS OF SAGA’S KUMUNZI KUBOTU

Abstract

Conflating the theoretical ‘givings’ of modality, semiotics and memory studies, the article attempts to gain insights into how material narration of affect, nostalgia and subjunctivity are constructed and transacted in song. In scholarly works that focus on the interplay between linguistics and musicology, rarely do notions of affect, especially the ones attuned to nostalgia and modality, feature in the discussion. This article assumes that the lyrical affordances in most Zambian compositions discursively unravel high level cognitive regimes of which affect, nostalgia and modality are central. This treatment uses song as its discursive and analytical material, in which nostalgia, affect and modality are seen as recursive memory and linguistic regimes in the unfolding of the artist’s monologue of the sum total of self, and the double articulation of the ‘subjective self’ and ‘objective other,’ both of which are potentiated by the reimaging of self, while playing ‘the plural’ in the ‘concealment of the subjective self’ through the use of the plural ‘basa kumunzi nkubotu’ in Saga’s Kumunzi Kubotu.