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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Singing the Unsayable: Violence, the Body and Song
| Panel |
57. Post-apartheid's social imaginaries
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| Paper ID | 741 |
| Author(s) |
Gunner, Liz
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The space of performance has become an enabling arena for the discussion of taboo topics and issues in the wider body politic in post-1994 South Africa. The songs I focus on have been constructed for a time of violence as well as one of flux and social transformation. The genre is called, variously, isicathamiya (cat-walking), nightsong, imbube, cothoza (tiptoe). In the hands of its youthful re-creators it is being bent, pulled, shifted 'stretched to breaking point' some may say. Nevertheless, its perameters remain recognisable and the moral authority of the genre gives it a capacity to be heard by a number of social groups.The notion of the popular with which I work is that of a body of expression that is constituted of subaltern voices, that captures the gestures of dissent of such groups; it also recognises the creativity of the hybrid that allows constant raiding across 'borders' in this case those that are sometimes seen to mark out tradition from the modern, and the national and local from the global. |
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