{"title":"The ears of apartheid","authors":"W. Froneman","doi":"10.1080/02533952.2023.2168596","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers white popular music of the 1950s and 1960s as a zone of what J.M. Coetzee has termed apartheid’s confessional “heart-speech” – a zone that explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, I show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped aesthetic sensibility for disavowing black sonic presence, arguing that this may account for one way in which the madness of apartheid spread through the social body. Popular music propagated the madness of apartheid not by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematising racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws: all under the cover of background entertainment. Out of this listening praxis, a perverted white ear took shape that heard “whiteness” whenever confronted with difference, and “home” when confronted with the sonic presence of the racial other.","PeriodicalId":51765,"journal":{"name":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"100 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Dynamics-A Journal of African Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2023.2168596","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"AREA STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article considers white popular music of the 1950s and 1960s as a zone of what J.M. Coetzee has termed apartheid’s confessional “heart-speech” – a zone that explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, I show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped aesthetic sensibility for disavowing black sonic presence, arguing that this may account for one way in which the madness of apartheid spread through the social body. Popular music propagated the madness of apartheid not by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematising racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws: all under the cover of background entertainment. Out of this listening praxis, a perverted white ear took shape that heard “whiteness” whenever confronted with difference, and “home” when confronted with the sonic presence of the racial other.
期刊介绍：
Social Dynamics is the journal of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. It has been published since 1975, and is committed to advancing interdisciplinary academic research, fostering debate and addressing current issues pertaining to the African continent. Articles cover the full range of humanities and social sciences including anthropology, archaeology, economics, education, history, literary and language studies, music, politics, psychology and sociology.
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