Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

Examines how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble uses musical performance and storytelling to manage, structure, model, and legitimize power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda. Tuning the Kingdom draws on oral and written accounts, archival research, and musical analysis to examine how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble of the Kingdom of Buganda (arguably the kingdom's oldest and longest-surviving performance ensemble) has historically managed, structured, modeled, and legitimized power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda. Damascus Kafumbe argues that the ensemble sustains a complex sociopolitical hierarchy, interweaving and maintaining a delicate balance between kin and clan ties and royal prerogatives through musical performance and storytelling that integrates human and nonhuman stories. He describes this phenomenonas "tuning the kingdom," and he compares it to the process of tensioning or stretching Kiganda drums, which are always moving in and out of tune. Even as Kawuugulu continues to adapt to the rapidly changing world around it, Tuning the Kingdom documents how Kawuugulu has historically articulated and embodied principles of the three inextricably related domains that serve as the backbone of Kiganda politics: kinship, clanship, and kingship. Winner of the 2020 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize of the African and African Diasporic Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Honorable Mention for the 2019 Ogot Book Prize of the African Studies Association Damascus Kafumbe is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College.