Thinking Sound, Here

The history of sound and its study on, off, and of the continent of Africa is one that is haunted by the collecting and ethnographic practices of disciplines forged in the colonial encounter, such as anthropology and in particular ethnomusicology. The most pertinent, timely, but perhaps both unexpected and fragile intervention that Kwaito Bodies, therefore, offers is perhaps a language with which to guide the way out of this long crisis at the heart of South African music studies. This is a language markedly different, I would argue, to the kind proposed by Ballantine in his address mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Kwaito Bodies leads us to the weave of the fabric of the study of sound in the south: a concept of mixture and encounter. Livermon may set the tone for an undoing of sound studies in the wake of its own self-critique. As if hearing the echo of crisis in the south, the Eurocentrism of the ever-emerging field of sound studies has recently been called into question, seen most prominently in the publication of a text titled Remapping Sound Studies which has called for a hemispheric concept as opposed to the planetary concept that is diaspora. ‘Southern sound studies,’ as this concept is termed, is intended to reorient the thinking of othered sound. The volume, which is co-edited by South African kwaito scholar Gavin Steingo, offers an alternative situating of sound studies in what the editors assert as the global south, with the intention being to draw closer the terms ‘sound’ and ‘south’ so as to mark their comradeship in being “Others of the visual and the North” (Steingo and Sykes, 5). Of particular interest for our discussion here, and a juxtaposition to Livermon’s concept of Afrodiasporic Space, are the ways in which the authors intend to “develop a new cartography of global modernity for sound studies” (2). This new cartography is intended to shift the positionally of disciplinary listening and to listen to and from the south as a means by which to attend to studies that have otherwise been omitted from the sound studies canon (8). The volume also calls for an idea of sonic history as a non-linear, friction saturated space, one which will theoretically allow for “politicised, historically situated, and culturally diverse narratives of sonic encounters in global modernity among variously defined peoples and their notions of sound” (12). There are two chapters of the volume that deal directly with Africa (as a continent, not discursive formation). A chapter by Steingo titled “Another Resonance: Africa and the Study of Sound” takes the reader through the three main claims of sound studies—technology and the listening subject, networks of music circulation, and the biopolitics of listening—and deploys ethnographic vignettes from South Africa and Cameroon to disrupt these and demonstrate how sound practice in African locales differs from how sound is theorized elsewhere (53). Another chapter, titled “Ululation,” by South African ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes, offers, too, an ethnographic vignette of South African vocal performance in an argument that suggests that “marking the global South makes explicit the requirement that sound studies be gendered; its discourse racialised; its relationality recognised; and its sounds heard as particular” (63).

It should be clear to the reader by now that what this essay is interested in is how Kwaito Bodies might offer an account of how the latter requirement can be performed without reproducing a hemispheric cartography of difference that sounds like ethnographic encounter, which is the inheritance of music and sound studies in the south. Interventions such as described above matter if we are to take seriously Livermon’s call for an embodied theory of encounter as one that must be premised on an idea of mixture that is not racialization. It is also important if we are to grasp that theory of encounter as a key component of practices of freedom and their remastery. The invocation of the global in southern sound studies is a useful point of departure, as it draws on both the debate around the global that designates the limit of kwaito scholarship and the question of race and sound that animates Livermon’s engagement with the form. If the existing scholarship has grappled with anything, it has been the nexus of the global and the local at which kwaito has seemingly emerged. In a smaller subset of the scholarship on kwaito, there is a suggestion of a global imagination that kwaito facilitates access to. This global imagination—different to the one that can be argued gives rise to global apartheid—is core to an idea that diasporic identification is key to understanding how the globalization of black youth cultures and South African popular music happens. This scholarship is trying at its core to grapple with and conceptualize the forms of global exchange that occur in these youth cultures anyway. Livermon cites the work of Thomas Blom Hansen who, in trying to make sense of how an Afro-Indian identity is facilitated through kwaito, notes that “kwaito reappropriates the Afrodiasporic sounds and styles that had once been removed from its lived contexts and transformed into a desirable global commodity” (17). Another key debate, as Livermon points out, is around kwaito and authenticity. Livermon notes that “kwaito represented a form of creative resistance to the forces of globalisation” (17) and that is what allowed it to enter South African popular music, countering arguments that either see kwaito as an internationally influenced genre or a mere expansion of world youth music genres. These positions, according to Livermon, “take for granted that kwaito itself emerges as a result of globalisation” (17). The emergence of kwaito, according to Gavin Steingo, must be thought as the consequence of global forces, both political and economic, and the effects thereof upon global popular culture. This is against reading it as merely the “logical extension of political liberation” (20), which in turn argues that the much larger repercussions of the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism influenced kwaito greater than the end of apartheid did in its formative moments. Livermon suggests it may be better to think of this relation as symbiotic or to imagine kwaito as being in the world rather than in the south.

In this way, kwaito as explored in Livermon’s text and against the debates in the field productively shows up sound’s ambivalence as an object of intellectual inquiry. There is a way in which the sound object is a thorn in the side of music studies as it pertains to the question of the postapartheid. This tension of the ambivalent syncretic sound object, captured most poignantly in the oscillation between tradition and modernity in the scholarship on African choral traditions, haunts music studies and its iterations after apartheid. A good comparative exercise is to take the scholarship on Nkosi Sikelela iAfrika, the hymn that became South Africa’s national anthem, and Livermon’s own engagement with the hymn. The former is an extensive literature that, too, leans towards the hymn as being a marker of syncretism as well as resistance and transgression.4 Through an analysis of Boom Shaka’s rendition of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, Livermon asks what it might mean to think the South African nation and postapartheid freedom through the sonic frameworks of kwaito. In order to develop his reading of the hymn, Livermon introduces the core conceptual tools of Afrodiasporic Space and kwaito bodies that will be central to engaging the contemporary practices of subjectivity in South Africa. The body in Livermon’s theory is not a physical one, but also figurative, and Livermon writes it as a site for the creative reworking of Afrodiasporic cultures both inside and outside Africa as continent, a diasporic product of the material exchange of bodies and cultural products across the Atlantic and within Africa itself. Drawing on the work of Tuulikki Pietila, Livermon notes how community forms in and around the mixture of style and symbol, between local black history and the contemporary Black Atlantic. Over and above this concept of the body, however, is a reading of it as an anti-nationalist body. In the analysis of Boom Shaka’s performance of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, Livermon notes how the idea of purity rooted in national belonging is troubled by the anthem’s reinvocations, noting that “kwaito bodies cannot be contained by the national script of Black heteropatriarchal redemption” (47, 51–52). Boom Shaka is performing the nation diasporically, perhaps in much the same way that Sol Plaatje did in his recording of the hymn in London in 1923 after his disillusionment with the nationalist politics of the South African National Native Congress (the precursor to the postapartheid ruling party of South Africa, the African National Congress).5 Through such diasporic identification, Livermon contends, “kwaito bodies reveal both implicitly and explicitly the fallacy of the nationalist concept and the violence that such a concept visits upon the most vulnerable members of the South African polity” (56).

Moving with Diaspora

Alongside kwaito bodies, the concept of Afrodiasporic Space is elaborated as part of the set of analytical tools by which to engage critically the contemporary practices of subjectivity and subject-making in South Africa. Here, Livermon is implicitly posing the question of what sound study—or the act of making sense of sound—does to the subject, particularly the black subject, which is a question that we see refracted in the debates highlighted by Ballantine and others navigating the crisis of postapartheid music studies in South Africa. Afrodiasporic Space brings together mixture and geography, spatiality and subjectivity, and space and being in relation to kwaito. Livermon introduces the concept as that which is based on two key traditions in diaspora studies. The first which is conceptualized from the standpoint of African experiences on the continent, is that it is through the multiple “processes of migration, encounter, and circulation (of people, ideas, commodities)” (30) that African subjectivity is formed and thought through. These processes also come to mark black subjectivity in the West, with several calls for more complex engagements with contemporary African experiences as they relate to diaspora studies. These arguments “lament the lack of coevalness with which African experiences are analysed within African Diaspora studies,” (30) which aims to dislodge the tendency to read Africa as always in the past and to situate any theorizing of and from the diaspora there. For Livermon, echoing theorists such as Ntongela Masilela who has argued for a closer reading of the intellectual traditions of the New African Movement in relation to its internationalism and its practices of undoing tradition in the wake of its invention,6 to locate Africa in Afrodiasporic Space is to mark it as “a constitutive and continuous site of diaspora” (30). The second tradition is based on thinking diasporas as theoretical concepts and constituting Africa as diasporic precisely because it inherits the same conceptual and ideological space as diaspora. In this sense, diaspora space, as Livermon cites Avtar Brah, is a conceptual category that is “inhabited not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous” (29–30).

Read alongside the history of migrant labor in South Africa (and its role in the growth of the city of Johannesburg from which kwaito emerges) and the complicated relationship between race and ethnicity that marks Southern African history, the concept of diaspora when deployed in relation to kwaito carries a poignant weight that troubles what we might constitute as the space of black life in the postapartheid.7 In some sense, Afrodiasporic Space as a concept allows Livermon to theorize exchange and encounter coterminously precisely because at its core is a dynamic of mixture.8 It thus permits Livermon to constitute a concept of mixture against the racial hierarchization emblematic of postapartheid South Africa, which poses a particular challenge to theorizing mixing in South Africa from other contexts. This is a hint at the problem of apartheid proper—perhaps a return thereof—that Livermon never addresses as a theoretical problem. It is a problem insofar as it comes to determine Livermon’s situating of black positionalities that come to form Afrodiasporic Space. For Livermon, the modes of encounter marked by Afrodiasporic Space posit difference as that which is worked through in a spectrum of entangled black experience, “fundamentally different from the differentiations and intermixtures that are produced from the systems of plantation slavery,” and apartheid, we might add (72, 73).9 It is the process of Afrodiasporic Space—the idea that affinity might be produced in the encounter and from that a remastery of race—that is central to its deployment by Livermon to think kwaito (25). At this point, Livermon comes up against the very national formation that his argument suggests kwaito attempts to undo: South Africa, as black, as African, as worldly, as settler colonial, as apartheid, as good neighborliness.

The idea of the nation as reworked in Kwaito Bodies is one that relies on a particular concept of diaspora, one that is a means by which to think what is excluded in the postapartheid nation (56). The result of kwaito performance on the idea of South Africa is that it constitutes alternative formations that underscore the multiple transnational encounters that come to structure the South African nation. In this way, Livermon points out, “the nation is not an assumed insular entity; instead it is already scripted as a global, transnational project” (31–32). It is, however, as if recalling the repetition of a particular form of difference—that is apartheid’s difference—through the ethnographic encounter that the weight of the nation as an organizing dynamic becomes tangible. For example, Livermon recounts an encounter with police where his isiZulu reveals coded assumptions about culture and language, and where Livermon notes his own diasporic sense of belonging, stating that “I am used to living in the slippage between preconceived categories of nation, masculinity, or race” (81–82).

Remastering the Present

In a podcast interview about his book Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century, author Dhanveer Singh Brar unpacks “the changing same,” a concept by Amiri Baraka used to unfold the “metaphysical project of black diasporic music” or “a kind of complication of the modernist drive towards the new [or] new horizons” through “a constant push to develop new forms of the music” but in that push, “fragments of the past are always remain[ing], always reworked.” For Brar, this signifies that “nothing is ever a complete break from the past” and that “musical memory or historical memory is always carried over and readapted.” Marking the movement of sonic memory and performance in this way, Brar cautions against reading it as mere tradition or genealogy, noting that “that’s not to say there are strict genealogies; it’s how you listen.” What Brar is underscoring is not only the way in which “black music has to be thought through its historical condition’s production,” but moreover that “the music as a social and philosophical endeavor is trying to rethink and constantly change and break—make bids for freedom out of it—and that’s where you might get something like the question of blackness appear.”

What Brar refers to as “the changing same” and the call to focus on the “how” of listening is captured in the intersection between what Livermon calls remastery and furthermore Livermon’s concept of Afrodiasporic Space. Kwaito Bodies is concerned with the role of kwaito as a musical genre, performative practice, and convivial structure that supports the numerous ways in which black South Africans interrogate contemporary South African socio-political life. Through an ethnographic approach based on fifteen years of research, Livermore calls for reading the political and social intensity of the practices of kwaito as an index for understanding black leisure, pleasure, consumption, and ultimately, liberation.

One of the three pillars upon which Livermon’s argument rests is the notion of remastering, a concept developed to track the shifts in black subjectivity through performance practices in kwaito. It is central to Livermon’s approach, which asks how kwaito is put to use rather than analyzing it as a genre. It is in this way that remastering can be put to work to think the effects of kwaito upon space, consumption, encounter, and hierarchies of race. The term, which is borrowed from the technical vocabulary of music production, is meant to portray postapartheid South Africa itself as a kind of studio, within which the very idea of freedom is enhanced—or remastered, cleaned up without any new additions—through practices associated with kwaito. The term is deployed in two distinct senses, operating in a symbiotic and synergistic relationship. The first use of remaster is as a verb, which allows Livermon to register shifts in kwaito performance and their meaning as they circulate in the political economy. In this way, remaster is true to its original use-case: “a much more subtle approach as opposed to remixing since mastering is very limited.” “You can only do so much,” as Livermon points out (12). Beyond this direct use of remaster, Livermon unfolds the concept to suggest how it might register as freedom itself having a new master, and how it might project something entirely new in the aftermath of the racial colonialism that was, and for all intents and purposes, still is, postapartheid South Africa.

The notion of freedom itself having a new master is a provocative one, and it is best thought through kwaito as a prism for contemporary life in postapartheid South Africa, and for the idea of the after and apartheid in postapartheid. Livermon makes the point that kwaito is a critical site from which to survey and presumably understand contemporary South African life. This view of kwaito as an alternative site is one that acknowledges the political dimension of the performative practices of black South African youth even when these practices might not directly challenge or claim to dismantle the global or local status quo. Livermon likens the act of remastering, which does not change the original recording but merely cleans up its imperfections, to the transition from apartheid to the postapartheid in South Africa, noting how “the racial colonial implications of the postapartheid transition [ensure that] the difference that may not be so different after all” (12). The process of remastering could, then, be conceived as a process of recuperation in practice or a reproduction of the past and its shape, at least in the sense of a recovery of an ideal, of freedom itself against what Livermon has called “the residues of colonial capitalist hierarchy . . . something that sounds like freedom but is in fact just a clearer copy of an unsatisfying original” (12).

Livermon introduces the role of leisure practices as micropractices of freedom that remaster urban space and the hierarchies of postapartheid South Africa. Through an ethnographic weaving of the notions of conviviality, encounter, and motswako as it unfolds in urban Johannesburg, Livermon suggests that kwaito permits a traversal of the divisions of space in the political economy whilst simultaneously reinforcing these divisions. This traversal of space is in a way another hint at the opacity of kwaito, its ability to self-organize, ab-use, and steal away in its practice and form.

The various ways in which kwaito challenges the ideas and lived realities of class, race, geography, sexuality, and gender produced by the transition period in South Africa to the postapartheid era have allowed different performative practices for black bodies, which Livermon tracks. How does remastering produce difference? Is apartheid’s project one of producing difference? Is freedom an escape from the structure that produces difference, or is freedom the ability to produce difference differently, to give it a new master? To put it in this way is to ask what the performance of freedom by bodies otherwise not welcome to it might mean for freedom itself (13). To phrase it as such is also to ask what about freedom articulated as such calls for a future remastered. The concept of freedom that Livermon draws attention to is one that is invoked in postapartheid South Africa as that which must always reckon with the past. It is in this sense that remastering presupposes a concept of the postapartheid not as a break, but as continuation: of colonialism, apartheid, and resistance. Kwaito troubles the timeliness of cultural form, rather than cement the cultural form as temporal. If we are to experience and understand kwaito as a time-folding cultural form we must see that it takes place through and upon the bodies of black youth in the postapartheid period, that kwaito’s movement is both individual and collective, and how “the kwaito body reveals a Black body intimately connected with the politics of excess that manifests itself as exuberance and joy.”10 This is how freedom itself becomes a “performative technology deployed by kwaito bodies to signify differently in a context that is not so different after all” (12).

A return to the problem of good neighborliness reminds us not only of the ethnolinguistic categories of culture that Ballantine relies on for a future but also of the ways in which Livermon’s text turns kwaito (and its subsequent articulation as an object of intellectual inquiry) away from the structure of thought that would render it as mixture, in the crudest sense. Instead, Livermore begins to sketch for us a concept of the kwaito subject/body as reworking the scripts of the disciplines of sound that produce those ethnolinguistic categories of culture. These scripts include the intellectual inheritance that is doubled edged: it is the disciplining of sounding bodies through the technology of sound reproduction that on the one hand produces the concept and territorialization of African music on the outskirts of Berlin in the late nineteenth century, and on the other, ab-used by its subject to produce the sonic traditions in which a form like kwaito ought to find its lineage.11 This is perhaps why the notion of remastery read alongside Livermon’s notion of Afrodiasporic space hints at freedom.

A key part of Livermon’s argument that kwaito is novel and politically disruptive for postapartheid South Africa is reliant on the performances of kwaito bodies: the urban performances of an adolescent and adult generation of postapartheid black people which become the critical lens through which Livermon analyzes the form and which contest and provide alternatives for the categories these bodies would otherwise be scripted through in South Africa’s postapartheid transition (10, 13, 31).12 Kwaito bodies accents the concept of freedom at work in Livermon’s text with the possibility of an alternative notion of politics. By locating the freedom at work in the performances of kwaito bodies as a personal freedom posited on a lack of power to exercise freedom regardless of the wishes of others, Livermon argues that there is always already a disinterestedness in civic engagement and traditional forms of politics, or what is termed a “mode of organic intellectualism” (90, 98).13 Livermon thus insists on removing the political from its usual realm of electoral politics and into forms of body politics, practices of remastery that should be seen as a questioning of “statist and static forms of freedom” (53). Through kwaito bodies, Livermon introduces a concept that exceeds the racialized and gendered subjectivities otherwise implicitly produced by prior scholarship as a means by which to constitute the bodies of kwaito performers and consumers as the “sites of subversion, visuality, and sensuality that frame the performative notion of being a Black youth” (13–14, 119).14 Whilst prior scholarship might attend to what Livermon calls the “musical processes and backyard sociality via technology and circulation” and the “vexed quality of the relationship between consumption, political agency, and kwaito art,” Kwaito Bodies is interested in the performative event of kwaito.

Towards the Postapartheid

Livermon makes the argument that in its mediation of the black body, kwaito offers itself as an alternative technology to erstwhile technologies of the postapartheid state. In so doing, it does not suggest that kwaito and other popular cultural formations deconstruct the neoliberal contract of postapartheid South Africa nor does it establish a linear or binary relationship with the political or economic politics that lay claim to liberation. Rather, kwaito offers a means by which to negotiate these social contracts. Because of the ways in which kwaito uncovers the limits of national recognition for black South Africans, it is able to become a platform for negotiating this limit through its existence as a cultural formation (3). Kwaito constitutes a different national body, and “reveal[s] both implicitly and explicitly the fallacy of the nationalist concept and the violence that such a concept visits on the most vulnerable members of the South African polity” (56). This is a point most forcefully explored in the fourth chapter of Livermon’s book where an analysis of the performances of Lebo Mathosa and the constitution of the black feminine body in postapartheid South Africa uncover “the persistent (hetero)patriarchy of the postapartheid nation and its violence [that] require[s] an imagination for black women that is transnational” (150).

The term ‘kwaito’ comes to signify a musical form, a performance practice, a sense of style, and a cultural movement. As a musical form, it inherits the sonic traditions of house and dancehall music, and its use of sampling slows it down without reducing the intensity and combines it with hip hop’s vocal expressiveness. It is both political and apolitical, after apartheid and postapartheid, present and past. It is a transitionary term and a term of translation. Its etymology is complicated: to be cool, hot, or angry in an informal context, and bad tempered, vicious, harsh, or strict in formal contexts are all definitions of the Afrikaans word kwaai, supposedly at its root. Apparently, the suffix ‘-to’ refers to the end of the word for the township of Soweto in Johannesburg, which itself is a contraction from the term South West Township, and is taken to mean something akin to ‘the hot sounds in the township’ or ‘rage of the townships.’ As this essay has repeatedly hinted at, the question of the nation after apartheid and postapartheid national belonging are central to any discussion of kwaito. If Livermon asks “what it means to perform the nation to a kwaito beat” and is concerned with “how the nationalist project of freedom might be remastered by those who find kwaito meaningful to their lives,” it is because as a form kwaito has seemingly embraced the political whilst simultaneously pushing it away (25). Part of the problem lies in the conceptualization of the postapartheid itself, a problem that Livermon hints at through an extensive discussion of the ‘rainbow nation’ and the relationship between history and memory that animates the sixth chapter. The notion of the rainbow nation is, according to its critics, taken up as a specific form of postapartheid governmentality and weaponizes an existing discourse of difference towards social cohesion, which is a term we heard Ballantine name earlier. Livermon notes how critics argued it had shifted into “a facile and apolitical celebration of multiculturalism, imposed from the top down, that rarely poses a challenge to entrenched social divisions” (7). The incorporation of black South Africans into postapartheid belonging is thus marked by the transition to democracy, which Livermon points out stands on a compromise that did not undo the classed, gendered, sexualized, and racialized inequality that is core to apartheid proper. In the text, this sense of belonging is animated through Livermon’s focus on space and geography, demonstrating how the postapartheid state has taken as its project the restoration of the black body to the urban site and to the national ideal, and how whilst cities became sites of possibility for previously excluded black bodies, the idea of the right to the city was, and still is, not as straight forward as it seems. It is through the pursuit of sonic pleasure that a different city becomes available to assertive young black South Africans, and thus the changes in the postapartheid landscape of the city are neither unidirectional nor centered.

How, after apartheid, must we live together? This essay opened with this question, and in closing I would like to reiterate it but in different terms. Close and attentive readers would have noticed that in this essay I have not hyphenated the term ‘postapartheid.’ This is intentional. Livermon uses the hyphenated form ‘post-apartheid,’ deploying it as a periodization. But lurking beneath the surface of his text is an acknowledgement that it might mean something more, thus betraying its possible deployment as a concept or mode rather than simply as a periodization. I want to suggest that the hyphenation of post-apartheid is a missed opportunity to elevate Livermon’s argument and make a distinctive claim on the question of difference. In an edited volume titled Remains of the Social: Desiring the Postapartheid, the postapartheid as a discursive formation rather than a periodization emerges in its most salient form. In the text, the editors call for a move away from the usual reading of the social that follows apartheid as either “an ideal that must be vigorously defended or triumphantly declared” (Van Bever Donker et al., ix).15 As an act towards unsettling this structure of oscillation, the volume calls for a rigorous questioning of the social by attending to what is remaindered in the production of the social. In so doing, the volume “treats the social as a problematic, one from which it is difficult to emerge unscarred,” and it “ask[s] after what is rendered unliveable as a condition of the possibility of the social”(ix). The reason for invoking this volume is precisely because it renders apartheid as a problem that has no borders and that cannot be contained temporally or geographically in South Africa, or the south for that matter. Rather, the editors posit, to think apartheid as a problem for thought requires an acknowledgement that the postapartheid is “neither a point in time nor a political dispensation, but rather a condition that names the labour of coming to terms with and working through the desires, principles, critiques, and modes of ordering that apartheid both enabled and foreclosed” (1–2). In a very real sense, Livermon’s concept of difference, whilst not entirely divulged as such, operates adjacent if not within a scripting of the postapartheid as not mourning, nostalgia, or melancholia as the editors of Remains of the Social claim many studies on the social do, and underscores the present as the site for practices of freedom against apartheid’s difference.

Xavier Livermon’s Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa is much like the practices it describes. It reveals much if one attunes oneself to the timeliness of its accounts and the timeliness of its arguments. It presents a set of ideas around the practice of freedom that pushes us towards thinking apartheid’s difference in terms of the futures it foreclosed and disclosed. Livermon deftly brings South African studies of sound and culture into discussion with the diasporic in ways that, if paid attention, might undo the disciplinary legacies that structure intellectual listening practices. If read at all, kwaito should be read for the contours that mark its intervention into thinking sound, difference, and conviviality from a familiar elsewhere.

Aidan Erasmus is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. He has presented and published on topics relating to sound, technology, and music studies, South African history, and memory studies. His current research focuses on comparative histories of race, technology, and sound in Africa, with specific attention paid to intellectual histories of language, media, and memory.

Notes

1. Ballantine argues that these different influences “foster new ways of identifying, collaborating, joining: they connote new forms of identity, personhood, and community . . . . As such, they are musical metaphors of cohesion: of living together” (508). See also Layne.

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2. It is also profound that it is the academic circulation and privilege that the South African academy enjoys—not only because of the dynamics of settler colonialism but also because of the hemispheric dynamics of an academy whose objects remain southern and southerly—that mean many an intellectual conversation around what an undoing of difference through sound and music might look like is often made by, or refers to, a South African academic.

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3. Stephanus Muller and Willemien Froneman in a special issue of South African Music Studies open their editors’ introduction with: “When we started putting together the material for this double edition, ‘crisis’ was the word we repeatedly settled on” (vii).

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4. Gavin Steingo has been prolific in this regard. See for example, Steingo, 2017; Steingo, 2008; Coplan and Benneta; Olwage, 2004; and Olwage, 2002.

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5. See Erasmus.

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6. See Masilela, Ntongela. A South African Looks at the African Diaspora: Essays and Interviews. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2017.

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7. On the history of the concept of race in South Africa, see Rassool.

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8. Livermon notes how the global exchanges of house music that are often exhibited through kwaito can be thought of as “two possible nodes within a larger spatial framework that [Livermon] refer[s] to as Afrodiasporic Space” (50).

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9. After all, Livermon calls the results of encounter mixture.

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10. To illustrate this movement of collective bodies, Livermore leans upon ethnographic recollection, writing: “As I danced I performed a kind of freedom in concert with other kwaito bodies. Kwaito’s rhythms, even and seductively slow, produced body movements in me that were lithe and sensual, with emphasis on the sway of the disarticulated upper body and the pelvis. Simultaneously, kwaito songs seemed to require movements in my lower body that at times appeared to outpace the music itself” (121, 2).

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11. See Ames.

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12. Livermon asks: “What might it mean to tether a postapartheid political vernacular to kwaito bodies?” (10, 13, 31).

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13. Livermon attaches the idea of bodily freedom to self-fashioning through Achille Mbembe’s argument that elsewhere disenfranchised people do not have control over their bodies.

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14. An important aspect that demonstrates this is the performance of izikhotane and its disturbance of the heteronormative conceptualizations of male bodies. According to Livermon, s’khotane are figures that through performance become “queer subjects who deconstruct limiting binaries in the service of transforming how one conceives identity formations,” and through their performances “they reveal the very constructed nature of racial, class, gendered, and sexual identity, placing into crisis the perceived attachment of young township (male) bodies with poverty, hyper masculinity, and heteronormativity” (13–14, 119).

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15. As if echoing the debate around social cohesion that Christopher Ballantine invoked as a means out of the predicament of apartheid’s present, the editors claim that studies of social cohesion should be included in the inquiries that fall into this binary of responses. Van Bever Donker et al.

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Works Cited

1. Ames, Eric. 2003. “The Sound of Evolution.” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2: 297–325.

2. Ballantine, Christopher. 2015. “On Being Undone by Music: Thoughts Towards a South African Future Worth Having.” SAMUS: South African Music Studies 34/35 (2015): 501–20.

3. Coplan, David B., and Benneta Jules-Rosette. 2004. “‘Nkosi Sikelel’ IAfrika’: From Independent Spirit to Political Mobilization.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 1–2, no. 173–174: 343–67.

4. Erasmus, Aidan. 2018. The Sound of War: Apartheid, Audibility, and Resonance. PhD diss., University of the Western Cape.

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