The Boundaries of Blackness

Bibliographic Data

ID23625656
AuthorsZine Magubane (corresponding author)
Year2008
Pages212-232
Publication date2008-11-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueEmpires and Boundaries (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9780203890653-12
OpenAlexW3044365405
ISBN9780203890653
LanguageEN
Citations received17

This chapter explores the role that African-American performance culture played in the construction of a Black public sphere in late nineteenth-century colonial South Africa. It analyzes how minstrelsy and Jubilee choirs were harnessed by different African communities (as well as by Whites) in their efforts to construct competing visions of a Black public sphere. The image of the new world African, albeit presented in caricatured form, was the catalyst for the emergence of new forms of identity in South Africa that reimagined Blackness in ways quite distant from the one-dimensional stereotypes about Blackness that could be found in the racial discourse produced by Whites. Rather than engaging in a politics of reversal, which would have involved actively disarticulating the connections among Blackness, aggressiveness, danger, and impropriety, some African workers instead embraced and reworked these negative associations in their pursuit of heightened visibility.

Astrobiology · Physics · Music History and Culture · South African History and Culture

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