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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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    #07
  • ekaya

WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN

Resisting the Siren Song of Race

In the month of May 2022, Stellenbosch University came to a virtual standstill, as the university community attempted to come to terms with the racist urination incident at the Huis Marais residence. But another incident at Stellenbosch University in May has received less media attention: a student at a dance hosted by the Faculty of Law requested that a Bollywood song be played upon which she was allegedly verbally abused. The Cape Times reported that the request for an “Indian song” (in the context of a playlist that was perceived to be “predominantly white”) led to an altercation with the DJ and a white student who wanted, instead, to hear another “Afrikaans song”. The latter allegedly responded with “abhorrent, racist and defamatory comments that are offensive and degrading”, according to the Juridical Society of Stellenbosch University.

Reflections on transformational practices at universities in South Africa as it concerns the arts have thus far focused almost exclusively on visual culture. At Stellenbosch University, significant work has been done in this area, resulting in the acceptance of a policy on visual redress in 2021, various visual redress initiatives on campus and a number of important scholarly publications. What the Law Dance incident and the reporting thereof foreground, though, is the seemingly uncomplicated and pervasive linkage between race and song and the little-discussed role of sonic culture in the incubation of racial thinking. 

Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on atmoterrorism provide a theoretical underpinning for a notion of “sonic redress” as an anti-racist agenda at South African institutions. The twentieth century, Sloterdijk argues, has been characterised by the explication – through terrorism – of the “atmospheric conditions” that enable and sustain life, the pertinent example being the advent of gas warfare during World War I.[1]Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban, vol. 3: Foams (Plural Spherology) (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016). Terrorism, according to Sloterdijk, can be defined as attacks directed not at the body, but at the air and the environment around bodies. Air terrorism, in particular, makes manifest an aspect of living which had once only been a latent or naïve knowledge; it is the operationalization of a monstrous knowledge of how to make environments unbreathable or unliveable.

Conceptualizing the sonic as “atmospheric” in this sense, significantly raises the stakes for audible culture at a tertiary institution concerned with transformation. It suggests that the vibrating clouds of air around us may just be toxic or may be manipulated in some way to sustain certain forms of being while suppressing others. In this sense, the Law Dance incident posits that audibility may form part of a latent, immersive and potentially prejudicial and injurious sonic epistemology, making sonic bias an insidious form of racism no less dangerous than outrageous overt acts of degradation like urinating on a fellow student’s belongings. But the affective and performative aspects of racial thinking in sound and its entwinement with the basest of bodily functions is potentially even more sinister.

In the first part of his Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, which deals with human intimacy structures, Sloterdijk discusses the fetus encased in its mother’s womb as the primal scene of sonic discrimination. Essentially, Sloterdijk argues, the womb is a resonant psychoacoustic space where the beginnings of subjectivity emerge in relation to and in resonance with the mother’s voice. As the mother speaks to the child, the first touch between them is a sonorous one, and the ear develops in a responsive manner as the first proper organ of touch. Sloterdijk refers to this condition of the incipient human as bathing in a “Siren State”, where, much like Odysseus strapped to the pole, it is invited into the world by its mother’s first greeting, tailor-made for this particular embryonic being. In this primal welcoming, the mother’s voice is distinguished from all others in what can be thought of as the original attention economy. It is not so much that the gurgling of the mother’s digestive system and the myriad other sounds that enter the sonosphere of the womb vie for attention with the maternal calling, as that the sound that will later take the name “mother” defines itself from the outset as more significant than others, in the way it addresses itself uniquely as a welcoming to the ear that is being formed, which responds in kind by developing that particular ability to be addressed. “It is as if the voice and the ear had dissolved,” writes Sloterdijk, “in a shared sonorous plasma – the voice entirely geared towards beckoning, greeting and affectionate encasement, and the ear mobilized to go towards it and revived by melting into its sound.”[2]Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban, vol. 1: Bubbles (Microspherology) (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 512.

In the process of sonic absorption, the fetus learns a basic discernment that points to an incipient selfhood: the ability to listen or not to listen. If, Sloterdijk muses, the fetus should have sufficient neurological equipment to record and retain this early auditory input, “such neural ‘engravings’ or imprintings would then – like acquired acoustic universals, so to speak – prestructure everything yet to be heard.”:

Through prenatal auditions, the ear was equipped with a wealth of heavenly, acoustic prejudices which, in its later work in the noisy pandemonium of reality, facilitate orientation and especially selection. The wonderfully biased ear would thus be capable of recognizing its primal models at the greatest distance from the origin.

Sloterdijk, 1: Bubbles (Microspherology):507.

Conceiving of hearing as the primal sense of discrimination suggests the possibility of a “sonospheric” or “psychoacoustic” entrainment of racialized bodies via the ear and that music might be fundamentally involved in this affective attunement towards racial thinking and in the stranglehold of race and racism on public life. Reconceptualizing racism and race identity in this way – as “technologies of affect”,[3]Derek Hook, ‘Affecting Whiteness: Racism as Technology of Affect (1)’, International Journal of Critical Psychology 16 (2005): 74–99; Michalinos Zembylas, ‘Rethinking Race and Racism as Technologies of Affect: Theorizing the Implications for Anti-Racist Politics and Practice in Education’, Race Ethnicity and Education 18, no. 2 (2015): 145–62. as Derek Hook argues – is particularly discomfiting in the case of sound, because music so often signals to people a safe zone, that primal sense of being and feeling “at home”. Indeed, the insidiousness of race thinking is that it infuses empty racial categories with embodied meanings: race survives as a “felt identity”[4]Divya P. Tolia-Kelly and Mike Crang, Affect, Race, and Identities (London: Sage, 2010)., a contingent, affective “event”[5]Arun Saldanha, ‘Skin, Affect, Aggregation: Guattarian Variations on Fanon’, Environment and Planning A 42, no. 10 (2010): 2410–27., and a set of “seemingly ‘prediscursive’ forms of attachment and belonging” that come to feel “robust” and “substantial”.[6]Hook, ‘Affecting Whiteness: Racism as Technology of Affect (1)’. What is more, the coupling of sound and embodied identity is also sometimes legitimately put to work to create immune systems or sonic incubators within discriminatory contexts. So, for example, Nathan Trantraal writes of how he felt festooned in his office by the alleged discriminatory atmosphere at Stellenbosch University, and how he re-enwombed himself, so to speak, by playing loudly “his own” music as an act of defiance and self-preservation.

George Rawick once noted that racism “feeds on underground streams of sensibility”.[7]George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 128. This passage is also quoted by David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness. Attending to sound and sonic cultures as political, historical, social and individual atmospheric agents – and especially to how sound informs the embodiment of race and the collective moods that create and sustain racist prejudice – opens up new agendas for sound studies and for transformation initiatives aimed at dislodging structural racism at South African universities.

Notes
1. ↑ Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban, vol. 3: Foams (Plural Spherology) (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016).
2. ↑ Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban, vol. 1: Bubbles (Microspherology) (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 512.
3. ↑ Derek Hook, ‘Affecting Whiteness: Racism as Technology of Affect (1)’, International Journal of Critical Psychology 16 (2005): 74–99; Michalinos Zembylas, ‘Rethinking Race and Racism as Technologies of Affect: Theorizing the Implications for Anti-Racist Politics and Practice in Education’, Race Ethnicity and Education 18, no. 2 (2015): 145–62.
4. ↑ Divya P. Tolia-Kelly and Mike Crang, Affect, Race, and Identities (London: Sage, 2010).
5. ↑ Arun Saldanha, ‘Skin, Affect, Aggregation: Guattarian Variations on Fanon’, Environment and Planning A 42, no. 10 (2010): 2410–27.
6. ↑ Hook, ‘Affecting Whiteness: Racism as Technology of Affect (1)’.
7. ↑ George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 128. This passage is also quoted by David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness.
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ESTHER MARIE PAUW
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