Xavier Livermon, Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

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.

Sensuous movements

“…Beauty is a tricky question for brown and black male bodies, under the combined weight of colonial regimes of sexual fantasy, postcolonial regimes of state and nation, and global racial capital. Beauty can be a mode of racialized sexual objectification, a site and tool of racialized feminization located within legacies and structures of sexual deviancy and coded as cultural degeneracy and political failure (Fanon 1967;Bailey 2013;Johnson 2008;Livermon 2020;Manalansan 2003;Eng 2001;Munoz 1999;Macharia 2019;McClintock 1995;Nguyen 2014;Wu 2018). Beauty can be an index of knotting together practices, bodies and discourses of masculine as a symbol of postcolonial nationalism; beauty can operate 'as a form of aesthetic and sexual capital' (Reddy 2016: 6); and beauty can be a transnational regime of race, gender and desire (Lee 2019).…”

“…Ellapen centres lives and bodies which were used as indentured labour and raw matter for global racial capital and re-imagines the bodies, lives and memories of indentured Indians and their descendants as vivid and beautiful. The brown male body of his erotic studio photography moves through, complicates and is made beautiful by multiple relations: legacies of indentureship, the racial politics of postcolonial nationalism, and the frame of family and kinship (Gqola 2010;Hofmeyr and Williams 2011;Hofmeyr 2013;Livermon 2020).…”

“…These discourses of belonging and nation are shaped by histories and legacies of colonialism, indentureship and apartheid, overlaid with the class and caste politics of other forms of migration (for example, of merchants and lawyers) from India (and Pakistan) both before and after apartheid. Undergirded by postcolonial infrastructures under pressure because of the mandates of global capital, tensions between multiple communities in South Africa are produced at the nexus of race, class and caste (Nuttall 2009;Pirbhai 2009;Desai and Vahed 2010;Gupta, Hofmeyr, and Pearson, 2010;Hansen 2012;Bahadur 2014;Livermon 2020).…”

Playing with Origins: Racial Self‐Making and Embodying History in Togolese Capoeira

“…At the same time, Togolese capoeiristas make different moves with regard to their gendered aspirations of becoming particular kinds of Black men through diasporic performance. Hip hop, for example, captivates many young men in urban spaces contending precarity while carving out a way to be and become men distinct from local tropes and stereotypes (Dattatreyan 2020; Khabeer 2016; Livermon 2020).…”