Deterritorialised Blackness: (Re)making coloured identities in South AfricaPosted in Africa, Anthropology, Articles, Arts, Media Archive, Social Science, South Africa on 2010-02-27 02:52Z by Steven |
Deterritorialised Blackness: (Re)making coloured identities in South Africa
postamble
Volume 2, Number 1
2006
Janette Yarwood, Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
City University of New York
“When I was a kid in the early eighties, this music [hip-hop] was the first I’d heard that I could relate to. You know, ‘Fuck da Police’, and all that shit, that’s what I was feeling.”
Shamel X interview“Black is not a question of pigmentation. The Black I’m talking about is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category… Black was created as a political category in a certain historical moment.”2
During the summer of 2003 I took my first pre-dissertation trip to South Africa to develop my dissertation topic on coloured identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Although it is no secret that hip-hop as both a musical genre and a defined lifestyle has gained recognition and popularity around the globe, I was not quite prepared for what I experienced in South Africa. I encountered cars blasting Jay-Z, Sean Paul and P. Diddy among others; people wearing Sean John, Avirex or United States sports team jerseys; and cell phones ringing to the tunes of the latest 50 Cent or R. Kelly songs. I found that as a black person of Caribbean and American descent, I felt a common blackness with the coloured people I interacted with not because of a common African heritage but mainly because of black popular culture and hip-hop culture specifically. This led me to ask: What does it mean to be black in today’s world? Is there a transnational or globalised notion of blackness?…
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