Bodies in motion, bodies in space, performing bodies, bodies enunciating a new political order: these are the subjects thrown into sharp relief in Xavier Livermon's Kwaito Bodies: Mastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa. An important contribution in a time when the Black body has (re)gained significant attention across the world, the book provides a visceral investigation into Black youth culture in postapartheid South Africa. In particular, it focuses on kwaito, a genre of music which came to define the early post-apartheid cultural imaginary, as a mediator of the Black body and draws on fifteen years of immersive ethnographic research in the country. Kwaito Bodies departs from existent kwaito scholarship in a number of important ways. It foregrounds contemporary practices of consumption instead of attempting to frame the genre within a continuation of struggle politics. Furthermore, kwaito is reconfigured as a strongly Afrodiasporic mode of music making, rather than an essentially South African practice. Most significantly, however, the author recentres the body in kwaito discourse, thereby drawing a careful (and largely unique) reading of the genre's attendants: the predominantly Black, working-class Y generation who came to age at the end of apartheid. Livermon looks to dance and corporeal representations in the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class performances and disruptions in a way that very few (if any) contributions to this field have done before.
Where postcolonial studies often retain a focus on the imperial metropole, decolonial analysis takes as an imperative the re-location of the critical nexus into former colonies. Yet with this shift there emerges a recalcitrant question about the need for decolonial analysis in the centre: if decolonization is something that happens in the periphery, why, for instance, should we engage with it in the United Kingdom? While this question might have been less pressing in music studies in the 1990s when systematic approaches to decolonial analysis first started gaining traction, I argue that the amnesiac appeals to the Anglosphere which have accompanied the Brexit vote implore us to consider the possibilities of decolonial analysis in musicology anew. I suggest that decolonial analysis can be reconfigured through the notion of the coloniality/modernity bind to turn the decolonial gaze upon the musical subject in the metropole.
Kevin Volans achieved remarkable fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Kronos Quartet's recordings of White Man Sleeps and Hunting:Gathering. With record-breaking album sales, he was perhaps even one of the most accessible twentieth-century composers operating outside of the popular or film music spheres. Thirty years later, his position could not be more different. Volans's controversial 2016 keynote at the Contemporary Music Centre Ireland, entitled ‘If You Need an Audience, We Don't Need You’, announced most vehemently his current stance in its Babbittean (or, more accurately perhaps, Feldmanesque) denouncement of populism and the music industry. For him, the tactics of publicists and marketers engender a breakdown in respect between audience and composer, while short-form works required by festivals are the epitome of a composition culture in regression.
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