The Groovology of White Affect : Boeremusiek and the Enregisterment of Race in South Africa

The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race formation in South Africa from a position immersed in the sonic. Mining boeremusiek’s “heart-speech” across two centuries of reception, the book offers a theory of race formation steeped in the music’s vernacular language and practices, and in the context of South Africa's race ideologies. The book’s chapters identifys and explore boeremusiek's affective modalities: embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The book then theorizes indexicality, music, affect and whiteness as three interlinked ontologies. When considered together, the book argues, boeremusiek’s modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as a matter of prejudice, but as a matter of (conditional) pleasure and (pathological) taste. The Groovology of White Affect articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way - amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism - for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism. Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Boeremusiek’s “Heart-Speech” The Rural Dreamtime of the Concertina Racism Isn’t What We Thought It Was: Boeremusiek, Race, and the Academy Whiteness As Affective Disorder The Metalanguage of Musical Affect and the Enregisterment of Race Affective Modalities of White Pleasure References Chapter 2: The Riches of Embarrassment Boeremusiek’s Basal Pathologies The Embarrassed White-Afrikaans Proto-Self Boeremusiek As Moral Pollutant Boeremusiek’s Vernacular Sociology of the Sacred Miscegenating the White “Inner Life” Mixing As Fascination; Embarrassment As Sublimation The Repeated Refusing of Embarrassed Listening References Chapter 3: Blackfaced Boeremusiek and the Racial Grotesque “Boeremusiek” As “Hotnotsmusiek” Colonial Mimicry and Ironic Compromise in Boeremusiek’s Nineteenth-Century History White Boere(Musiek) in Blackface From Blackface As History to Blackface As Affective Modality of Whiteness The “Wild and Weird Charm” of Concertina Music References Chapter 4: Epiphanies of Postcolonial Radiance The Metapragmatics of First Encounters Boeremusiek’s Crisis of Modernity White Modernity’s Old Time From Rapture to Enlightenment Boeremusiek’s “Translucency” and the Deficient Paraphrase Boeremusiek’s Failed Modernism References Chapter 5: Disavowal and the Perverted Mind of Apartheid The Nico Carstens Conundrum Boeremusiek Ain’t Boeremusiek Boeremusiek, Jazz, and the SABC Boeremusiek’s Syncretism Carstens’s Music As Race Music Boeremusiek with a Gammat Beat Boeremusiek Ain’t Kwela Verleugnung, Psychoanalysis, and the Colonial World Disavowal and the Spectacle of the Other Apartheid Eroticism; Apartheid Economics The Paradox of “Racial Capitalism” Unproductive Expenditure: Bataille, Boeremusiek, and Apartheid’s “Accursed Share” Homogeneity and Heterogeneity: Understanding Boeremusiek’s Syncretism in Apartheid’s “General Economy” References Chapter 6: The Groovology of White Affect Down Below: Boeremusiek and the “Savage Slot” in White Cultural Expression Metapragmatics, Affective Modalities, and Whiteness as nth-Order Indexicality Activating Boeremusiek’s “Mimetic Archive” of Affective Modalities Savagery—Redemption—Subjunctive Pleasure: The Metapragmatics of Boeremusiek’s Mimetic Archive Christian Soteriology: The White Side of (Musical) Salvation “Who Said Boeremusiek Can’t Be Fun?”—Soteriological Anxiety at a Contemporary Boeremusiek Event Affective Participatory Discrepancies and the Sacramental Embodiment of Whiteness References Index The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race-formation in South Africa from a perspective rooted in the sonic. The book treats music, affect and whiteness as three interlinked commandeering ontologies. It offers a music-based theory of race formation steeped in boeremusieks incredibly rich vernacular language and practices, and with South Africas race ideologies always simmering in the background. The first few chapters each identifies and explores one of boeremusieks pragmatic affective embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The final chapter argues that, when considered together, these modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as matter of prejudice, but as a matter of pleasure and a matter of taste. The book also articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism.