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Boeremusiek’s “Heart-Speech”

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The Groovology of White Affect

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Abstract

Precisely because boeremusiek has been so derided and ignored (both inside and outside of academia), it renders audible a take on racism and race formation that is distinctly sonic and affective, and thus not readily available to conventional analyses of literature, history, or political discourses on race in South Africa. The proposition is to analyze boeremusiek’s “metalanguage of affect” or “heart-speech” as outlining the parameters of what is posited here as a corrupted white aesthetic faculty.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kathrada (2000), p. 222.

  2. 2.

    Ahmed (2004), p. 22.

  3. 3.

    View footage from the 1986 TV Boeremusiek competition here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD2nIaW9q7c and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vyeqFzw_AY.

  4. 4.

    McKittrick and Weheliye (2017), pp. 13–42.

  5. 5.

    Thompson and Biddle (2013).

  6. 6.

    These oppositions are inspired by Shaun de Waal (2009).

  7. 7.

    Bouws (1957), pp. 77–81; Bouws (1968), pp. 363–375; Venter (2009), pp. 74–75; Malan (1979).

  8. 8.

    Lucia (2005), pp. 107–108.

  9. 9.

    Lucia (2005), p. 333.

  10. 10.

    Muller (2008), pp. 189–196.

  11. 11.

    Watkins (1996), p. ix.

  12. 12.

    Froneman and Muller (2020), pp. 203–218.

  13. 13.

    Turner (1969), p. 22.

  14. 14.

    Turner (1969), p. 22.

  15. 15.

    Coetzee (1991), p. 2.

  16. 16.

    Coetzee (1991), p. 2.

  17. 17.

    Coetzee (1991), p. 2.

  18. 18.

    Coetzee (1991), p. 3.

  19. 19.

    Hook (2005), pp. 74–99; Zembylas (2015), pp. 145–162.

  20. 20.

    Tolia-Kelly and Crang (2010).

  21. 21.

    Saldanha (2010), pp. 2410–2427.

  22. 22.

    Hook (2005).

  23. 23.

    Ahmed (2004), pp. 117–139.

  24. 24.

    Hook (2005); Hook (2011), pp. 107–115.

  25. 25.

    Nayak (2010), p. 2371; Zembylas (2015).

  26. 26.

    Tolia-Kelly and Crang (2010), p. 2313.

  27. 27.

    Feld and Fox (1994), p. 32. Also, see the case studies of talk about music in Steven Feld et al. (2004), p. 47.

  28. 28.

    Feld (1984), pp. 1–18; Porcello et al. (2010), pp. 51–66; Gray (2013); Gray (2021), pp. 1–19; Meintjes (2017).

  29. 29.

    Silverstein (1993), pp. 32–58.

  30. 30.

    Bateson (2000) and Goffman (1974).

  31. 31.

    Garcia (2020), p. 12.

  32. 32.

    Lila Ellen Gray has identified “work at the intersection of ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology on speech about timbre and on indexicality” as two of the generative areas of overlap between ethnomusicology and affect theory that remain relatively unexplored. I extend this idea to speech about affect as such. See Gray (2021), p. 331.

  33. 33.

    For a theorization of “register” in relation to musical affect, see Gray (2016), pp. 60–73.

  34. 34.

    Agha (2015), pp. 27–53. For a similar, if more literal, deployment of “enregisterment” in sonic culture, see Singh and Campbell (2022), pp. 408–430.

  35. 35.

    Eidsheim (2019).

  36. 36.

    Agha (2007), p. 81.

  37. 37.

    Silverstein’s definition of “metapragmatics” as the implicit and explicit code that “regiments” indexicals into identifiable but continuously shifting complexes refers. His notion of “indexical order” is also relevant here. These terms are unpacked in further detail in Chap. 6.

  38. 38.

    Keil (2004).

  39. 39.

    Urban (2006), pp. 401–407.

  40. 40.

    For the most recent summary of these debates, see Gray (2021).

  41. 41.

    Silverstein (1993).

  42. 42.

    Blacking (1973), Coplan (1985), Ballantine (2012), Erlmann (1991), Meintjes (2003), Meintjes (2017), Gavin Steingo (2016), Impey (2018), and Livermon (2020).

  43. 43.

    Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the distinction between a map and a tracing refers: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real … A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’.” Deleuze and Guattari (1987), pp. 12–13.

  44. 44.

    Davidsen-Nielsen (1990), p. 10; Swan and Westvik (1997), p. 103.

  45. 45.

    Perkins (1983), pp. 18–19.

  46. 46.

    Alexander (2006), p. 4.

  47. 47.

    Alexander (2006), p. 9.

  48. 48.

    Bataille (1985, 1988).

  49. 49.

    Trouillot (2003).

  50. 50.

    Mazzarella (2017).

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  1. Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Willemien Froneman

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Froneman, W. (2024). Boeremusiek’s “Heart-Speech”. In: The Groovology of White Affect. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40143-5_1

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