• Restless Itineraries

    Author(s):
    Louise Bethlehem (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    CLCS Global Anglophone, CLCS Global South, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture and Society, LLC African to 1990, TC Postcolonial Studies
    Subject(s):
    South African literature, Decolonization, Jazz--Instruction and study, Blacks--Study and teaching, Atlantic Ocean Region
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Miriam Makeba, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Jazz studies, Black Atlantic studies
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6RX93D1S
    Abstract:
    This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers historiographic traction over other Cold War settings. Throughout the international antiapartheid struggle, South African expressive culture was channeled through local paradigms of reception in the world beyond, in taut negotiation with aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, and political considerations. Instances of cultural translation, catachresis, and slippage resulting from the deterritorialization of South African cultural formations can thus be contextualized, historicized, and turned back reflexively on other conjunctures, to defamiliarize existing scholarship. Makeba’s long exile in Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea between 1969 and 1986 is examined in the light of these claims. Here, Makeba crosses a theater of intense ideological contestation following Touré’s 1968 socialist cultural revolution, illuminating some of its constitutive features. The article concludes with a consideration of Makeba’s agency as performer at the interface between militant cultural nationalism and state prohibition in revolutionary Guinea.
    Notes:
    This journal emerges from the European Research Council Project, APARTHEID-STOPS, see: https://scholars.huji.ac.il/ercapartheid/home
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1215/01642472-6917766
    Publisher:
    Duke University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2018-10-1
    Journal:
    Social Text
    Volume:
    36
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    47 - 69
    ISSN:
    0164-2472,1527-1951
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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