The Groovology of White Affect: Boeremusiek and the Enregisterment of Race in South Africa

ISBN-13: 9783031401428 / Angielski

Willemien Froneman

Spis treści

1. Boeremusiek’s “Heart-Speech”

2. The Riches of Embarrassment

3. Blackfaced Boeremusiek and the Racial Grotesque

4. Epiphanies of Postcolonial Radiance

5. Disavowal and the Perverted Mind of Apartheid

6. The Groovology of White Affect

O autorze

Willemien Froneman is an Associate Professor in the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research in Innovation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, where she also heads up the postgraduate degree programmes and leads an interdisciplinary cohort of postgraduate researchers and fellows. She holds degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Stellenbosch. Her interests extend from American music experimentalism to notions of avant-gardism and modernity in the Global South. Much of her published research is about whiteness and affect as these concerns relate to popular music vernaculars in South Africa. As the former editor of South African Music Studies, she has worked towards finding new forms of decolonial academic publishing that renders visible the realities of South African institutions and scholarly concerns. 

Blurb

The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race-formation in South Africa from a perspective rooted in the sonic. The book treats music, affect and whiteness as three interlinked commandeering ontologies. It offers a music-based theory of race formation steeped in boeremusiek’s incredibly rich vernacular language and practices, and with South Africa’s race ideologies always simmering in the background. The first few chapters each identifies and explores one of boeremusiek’s pragmatic affective registers: embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The final chapter argues that, when considered together, these modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as matter of prejudice, but as a matter of pleasure and a matter of taste. The book also articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way – amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism – for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism.

Willemien Froneman is an Associate Professor in the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research in Innovation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, where she also heads up the postgraduate degree programmes and leads an interdisciplinary cohort of postgraduate researchers and fellows. She holds degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Stellenbosch. Her interests extend from American music experimentalism to notions of avant-gardism and modernity in the Global South. Much of her published research is about whiteness and affect as these concerns relate to popular music vernaculars in South Africa. As the former editor of South African Music Studies, she has worked towards finding new forms of decolonial academic publishing that renders visible the realities of South African institutions and scholarly concerns.