A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Sociology) / Can there ever be a space for radical Black performativity, by which I mean, a type of Black performance that is a challenge to, and not just a reiteration of (including in others’ enjoyment of it) the anti-Blackness of the world? This project – film and conceptual essay - investigates the limits and boundaries of this question and it does so through kwaito: a uniquely South African post 1994 musical and cultural phenomenon that is specifically born from the experiences of township life and of Blackness in South Africa. It does so as a way to think about the validity of the proposition put forward by Black Studies (mainly in Afro-pessimism) that violence in the modern world underwrites the Black person’s capacity to think, act, and exist spatially and temporally, this is in opposition, say, to Fred Moten’s Black Optimism, that holds that ‘objects’, that is to say Blacks, can and do resist and they do so through performance. This project then enters the debate in Black Studies through a questioning of the ‘authenticity’ of Black radical performativity and cultural practices and it reads kwaito as a Black cultural performative practice that is a form of fugitivity. This paper looks at some of the more hopeful, humanistic interpretations of Black aesthetics and proposes as a challenge that we rather think about and read kwaito as something close to a deranged apocalyptic response to anti-Blackness, that does not offer answers, and is a movement that operates as a form of fugitivity that unveils the quotidian and banal subjectivity of Black township life in South Africa post 1994. / NG (2020)

M.A. University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities (Journalism and Media Studies), 2012 / This research investigates the representation of kwaito in the Sunday Times between 1994 and 2001, a period of transition for South Africa and the South African media. Kwaito, a music phenomenon that began in the streets of townships, was an important social development. Initially, it offered a range of ways in which post-apartheid black youth could represent themselves and their lives, both good and bad. The Sunday Times, on the other hand, was a white establishment newspaper that needed to change to represent a wider community and provide a space for the inclusion of previously neglected areas of South Africa cultural life. My analysis of all the articles on kwaito published in the newspaper demonstrates that the paper increasingly covered kwaito musicians and events, but tended to confine this coverage to the gossip pages of the City Metro, an insert aimed at black readers. On the other hand, commentators in feature and commentary articles in the main body, who had the power as “cultural consecrators” to investigate the meaning of kwaito as a phenomenon, tended to dismiss it as debased form of expression by lost youngsters. This bears out the argument by Hebdige that youth subcultures tend to be accommodated and contained by the media through a process of converting them into mass-produced objects or through neutering them ideologically.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio University, 2003. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Apr. 30, 2006). Includes bibliographical references (p. 272-287).