Blackfaced Boeremusiek and the Racial Grotesque

Abstract

This chapter traces boeremusiek’s roots in blackface minstrelsy by revisiting historical source materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By paying close attention to the linguistic tropes used to describe the concertina’s sound (as “wild” and “weird”), I show how the aesthetics of blackface bleeds into later descriptions of boeremusiek. I argue that a white sonic voyeurism around explicitly raced definitions of musicality is embedded in the way boeremusiek has been described and experienced in nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Africa, and that this constituted a crucial experiment in white settler subjectivity. Blackface, more than a performance practice that influenced boeremusiek stylistically in various ways, is the culmination of a broader aesthetic register in the history of concertina playing in South Africa. It functions as an ever present shadow side of white folk performance characterized by a subjective white anxiety as to whether one is participating as—or indeed becoming—one’s white “self” or one’s black “Other.”