The Groovology of White Affect

Boeremusiek and the Enregisterment of Race in South Africa

Willemien Froneman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031401428
• eBook ISBN: 9783031401435
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race formation in South Africa from a position immersed in the sonic. Mining boeremusiek’s “heart-speech” across two centuries of reception, the book offers a theory of race formation steeped in the music’s vernacular language and practices, and situated within South Africa's race ideologies. The book’s chapters identify and explore boeremusiek's affective modalities: embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The book then theorizes indexicality and music, affect, and whiteness as interlinked ontologies. When considered together, the book argues, boeremusiek’s modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as a matter of prejudice, but as a matter of (conditional) pleasure and (pathological) taste.

The Groovology of White Affect articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way—amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism—for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Boeremusiek’s “Heart-Speech”
• 2. The Riches of Embarrassment
• 3. Blackfaced Boeremusiek and the Racial Grotesque
• 4. Epiphanies of Postcolonial Radiance
• 5. Disavowal and the Perverted Mind of Apartheid
• 6. The Groovology of White Affect
• Back Matter