Kwaito Bodies: Black (Queer) Creativity in Transnational Context

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

In this roundtable, the panelists will engage in a conversation that links Xavier Livermon’s recent book, Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Postapartheid South Africa to a larger critical conversation within Black studies about the relationship between creativity and politics in Black Diasporic formations. Livermon argues that the youthful Black body in postapartheid South Africa was faced with a number of distinct challenges framed by the afterlives of colonialism and apartheid. Through protest and resistance they had freed themselves from apartheid only to encounter an additional set of (un)freedoms. Livermon suggest that kwaito as a cultural formation was a space for Black (Queer) youth in South Africa to test the possibilities and limitations of a “new” South Africa. Central to South Africa’s promise of freedom was a freeing of the body. Black youth in South Africa, particularly black queer youth used kwaito as a space to embody new sets of sociopolitical formations. Livermon considers what these sets of embodiments meant for postapartheid South Africa yet inflects this analysis with a diasporic framework suggesting that the practices of sonic embodiment were in critical dialogue with similarly situated cultural formations throughout the African Diaspora. In this way kwaito continued a long history of Black South African cultural dialogue with Afrodiasporic formations.

In this interdisciplinary panel featuring scholars from Women and Gender Studies, Music, and African American Studies, the panelists will discuss the arguments of the book and what kinds of diasporic, transnational inflections emerge from the intersection of music, performance, and queerness. In what ways does the cultural creativity of Black (Queer) Youth offer a set of possibilities for imagining freedom not only in postapartheid South Africa, but across the Black world?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association 2020

Chair

• Xavier Livermon, University of California-Santa Cruz

Panelists

• Marlon M Bailey, Washington University in St Louis

• LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Georgetown University

• Xavier Livermon, University of California-Santa Cruz