Vusumzi Nkomo
In Euro-modern philosophical anthropology and aesthetic judgement, Blacks, as Kant wrote, never “rise above the trifling,” but so too are their cultural productions dismissed1
Movement in the African diaspora is an enmeshed, interweaving, Relational dynamic, a motion of mobile Black bodies, in the Glissant sense. It is in this sense that we get to truly appreciate its complexity, what it has meant and given to the world, even when the world insists on not wanting what it gives (or holds and has to give in its “outstretched hands”2), but can’t live without. The world doesn’t want it and what it gives because it “constitutes a profound threat. . .to the already existing normative order” and thus the Movement’s wings must be “clipped. . .regulate it, exclude it, incercarate it”; it also can’t live without it and what it gives so it must “incorporate it, capitalize upon it, exploit it, accumulate it.”3
This dual ethical consideration cuts across Xavier Livermon’s recent Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa, as it should cut across all meditations on Black (social) life and bodies racially designated as Black, the things they produce, and the fucked up ways in which those things are misunderstood at best, and misunderstood at worst. More fucked up is the ways in which these bodies (Black), their physical location (Diaspora), “would not be names at all were it not for the trade in human cargo”4 and the “structural violence” which has paradigmatically positioned these bodies since the colonial Encounter.
Kwaito Bodies is an ethnographic study of Kwaito, the music genre and culture birthed in Johannesburg, and based on fieldwork conducted in Jozi by the author. The book deploys Black queer and feminist theory as the primary analytic lenses through which to think about how Kwaito challenge(s/d) constructions of gender and sexuality, and how prominent Kwaito artists reconfigured these normative strictures in an impressively performative fashion. Kwaito is productively positioned within the cartography & genealogy of Black cultural production and the African diaspora whose sonic, sartorial, political and performative traditions influence its foundations and give impetus to its most groundbreaking moments. We are drawn into a critique of Kwaito as it emerges and develops alongside very specific political and historical developments from late-apartheid uncertainty, the triumph of global capitalism neoliberal paradigm over the Soviet Union, and the Rainbow Nation, only to be dragged back to the destruction of Sophiatown. Key to this lifelong study are generative concepts, like “melancholic conviviality” (the centrality of the past in the collective imagination and cultural production), “cultural trauma” (loss of identity and disintegration at the level of collective meaning), “Remastery” (of space and sound and freedoms “within the residual context of racial colonialism”), “Kwaito bodies” (creators, performers and consumers of Kwaito as they are engaged in subversive practices, occupying a space Xavier defines as a “ forum for feminine agency” in the post-apartheid Apartheid milieu), and “Afrodiasporic Space”. Xavier mentions that
Afrodiasporic exchange culturally, musically, politically, and performatively between Black South Africans and Blacks from elsewhere reveals that the complex interplay and
cross-fertilizations of styles within kwaito cannot be dismissed as something new
Despite the seeping anti-Identity Politics sentiments against the conceptual characterization of Black people as ‘bodies’ (sentiments often accompanied by a desire and demand to speak in affirming and positive ways about Black people), I find Xavier’s deployment of ‘bodies’ to be quite generative & multilayered, and deserving of defense. The body becomes a central site and enabler of critique, because, among many other reasons, the “body is everywhere in critical theorizing about performance”, if we are to bite Mlondolozi Zondi5. It is necessary, as the author told me in an unpublished conversation, “to read the body as you would a text,” but to do so in a way that ensures that the thinker engaged in the critical enquiry doesn’t “disappear from the text”. As far as methodological practice is concerned, he mentions that “there are limitations to what my body can understand and interpret”, even though this must not be instrumentalized to mean “ward[ing] off legitimate criticism of the text”.
Additionally, with the risk of sounding morbidly fascinated with Black people, Xavier lands (accidentally) at a level of abstraction that permits a theorizing about Blackness from the point of Flesh and corporeal, Black bodies as they appear. I call it accidental because the author optimistically articulates, which is to say advances, arguments foregrounded by the possibility of freedoms which he suspiciously codes as “new”, but are so artificial they warrant a dismissal of the very concept of freedom. But the body, or flesh, as a locus of theorizing opens space for what Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, in the Black Grotesquerie, calls a “diminished life” of the “death bound [who] find themselves marked for disposal, deportation, and death, that is, the most socially, politically, and materially dispossessed.”6
Further, this careful embodied or “performance ethnography”, enables a kind of “auto-theory”, a genre loosely defined by Vinson Cunningham as an “attempt to arrive at a philosophy by way of the self”7, or to “theorize from a place of lived embodied experience, a site of exposure.”8 The book is intercepted, or rather punctuated, by brief autobiographical sketches (weaved with critical gender and race theory) of the author’s sojourn in Jozi where he got to immerse himself within the community (the nightclubs, township tarvens, festivals, June 16 festivities etc) and observed the queering of space and queering of future-dreams. What would otherwise be inaccessible fancy theory is made relatable to the intimate moments I would call active self-archiving (of both the author’s life as well as his newly found compatriots) that takes place throughout the book.
The book’s attempt to zoom into those moments that fall outside of the grand spectacles is commendable; for example, the major role minibus taxis played not only in the Movement of the new sound, but that space as a vehicle for critically engaging with Kwaito as it emerged. Xavier also makes an interesting claim: these quotidian moments position the consumers of Kwaito as essential practitioners who were engaged in “putting Kwaito to work”, by way of critiquing it, co-creating and disseminating it.
1 Athi Mongezeleli Joja, (2020). Bolekaja Aesthetics. Taken from Dossier: Afro-pessimist Aesthetics, edited by Sampada Aranke and Huey Copeland.
2 Saidiya Hartman (2016) appropriates Fred Moten’s phrase in The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors: “All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands.”
3 Fred Moten (2015), in conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, Do Black Lives Matter?: Robin D.G. Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation [Available here: https://vimeo.com/116111740]
4 Frank Wilderson, 2009. Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom
5 Mlondolozi Zondi, (2020). Haunting Gathering: Black Dance and Afro-pessimism. Taken from Dossier: Afro-pessimist Aesthetics, edited by Sampada Aranke and Huey Copeland.
6 Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, 2017. Black Grotesquerie. Oxford University Press.
7 Vinson Cunningham, 2020. The Argument of “Afropessimism”. The New Yorker [Available here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-argument-of-afropessimism]
8 George Yancy, 2008. Black bodies, white gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Rowman and Littlefield.