Social Science Research Council

"Music and the Non-Racial Imagination: Listening to Jazz in a Transitioning South Africa"

This dissertation examines the stylistic, aesthetic, symbolic and political contours of a distinct African popular music tradition, South African jazz. Against the shifting and contested terrain of South African race relations, I highlight and theorize the ways in which racial categories have been interrogated, resisted and rearticulated in the artistic practice of local jazz musicians and in commentary surrounding their work. I am particularly interested in how competing notions of "non-racialism," a notion that has moved from an anti-apartheid slogan to official state policy in the post-apartheid era, have coalesced around this music. South African jazz illustrates, I argue, that music can deconstruct race just as effectively as it can express it, and in so doing it reveals the performative nature of the very social identities that it is often taken to reflect.Combining approaches drawn from ethnomusicology, performance studies, cultural studies and related fields, I will employ archival, discographic, oral-historical and reflexive ethnographic methods in exploring the particular perspective that this music offers on the South African cultural transformation of the last decade. This entails theorizing apartheid as a cultural as well as a political system, and foregrounds the capacity of music to serve as a repository of social memory, as a resource in the forging of social identity, and as a vehicle of the political imagination.