|
|
AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Embodying oldness in new South African imaginaries
| Panel |
57. Post-apartheid's social imaginaries
|
| Paper ID | 780 |
| Author(s) |
Allen, Lara
|
| Paper |
No paper submitted
|
| Abstract | While the 'new South Africa' is perceived by many as a land of opportunity, it is also a place that generates deep anxieties. Some of the most fundamental of these are articulated in the questions: As new South Africans, who are we? And how do we establish that we belong to this new place; that we are rooted in it? I suggest that interrogating these anxieties is a particularly productive approach to the project of understanding everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa, and I argue that one of the primary sites for the establishment of roots is popular culture. Focusing on the music and dress, I suggest that one of the most common ways in which young South Africans perform roots into existence is through the quotation of history in these two modes of cultural embodiment. I interrogate the anxiety about rootedness experienced by black and white youth through an analysis of music and dress in two sub-cultural domains: I explore the ways in which kwaito culture co-opts the sophisticated, cosmopolitan style associated with Sophiatown in the 1950s, and I investigate the ways in which white Afrikaans youth culture alludes to what is still colloquially termed the Boer War. I question what it is about these eras that provide such productive raw material for contemporary youth? Why are these periods redeployed so successfully in the service present concerns? What does such redeployment reveal about the nature of these concerns? |
|