South Africa is a highly mobile country characterized by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic. Getting to grips with diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, as well as pursuing aspirations of mobility, is part of people’s daily experience that often takes place on the margins of conventional politics. A politics of conviviality is one such form of politics of the popular that emerges in contexts of rapid change, diversity, mobility, and the negotiation and mediation of complex affiliations and attachments. The questions in focus for this paper thus pertain to how forms of talk, born out of displacement, anomie and contact in the superdiverse contexts of South Africa, allow for the articulation of life-styles and aspirations that break with the historical faultlines of social and racial oppression. We first expand upon the idea of (marginal) linguistic practices as powerful mediations of political voice and agency, an idea that can be captured in the notion of linguistic citizenship, the rhetorical foundation of a politics of conviviality. We then move on to analyze the workings of linguistic citizenship in the multilingual practices of two distinct manifestations of popular culture, namely hip hop and a performance by a stand-up comedian in Mzoli’s meat market in Gugulethu, Cape Town. The paper concludes with a general discussion on the implications for politics of multilingualism and language policy.

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Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (eds) (2000) Senses of Culture: South African culture studies

Multilingualism in transformative spaces: contact and conviviality

In this thesis I deconstruct key concepts, terminologies, and rhetorical conventions employed in white South African writing on modern black art. I trace the genealogy of the dominant discursive practices of the apartheid era to the cultural discourses of the colonial era, which in turn had their origins in the Enlightenment. This genealogical tracing aims to demonstrate that South African art writing of the 20th century partook of a tradition of Western writing that was primarily intent upon producing the Western subject as a rational Enlightenment agent via the debased objectification of the colonial Other. In the process of the deconstruction, I identify the most significant discursive shifts that occurred from the 1930’s, when the first publications emerged, to the 1990’s, when South Africa’s new political dispensation opened up a different cultural landscape.

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Writing white on black : modernism as discursive paradigm in South African writing on modern Black art

This paper is part of a larger scholarly project that celebrates and investigates the singular role and power of cultural practices in the making of the black public sphere in South Africa. The vistas of encounter and engagement span the sites of the elites and those of the lumpen-posses of urban ghettoes. This paper focuses on a phenomenon of post-apartheid South Africa, namely kwaito music. It is premised on the notion of redemptive fantasy, an idea which in turn draws on Jacqueline Rose’s argument in States of Fantasy (1996: 4–5) that (i) there is no ‘way of understanding political identities and destinies without letting fantasy into the frame’, (ii) that ‘fantasy, even in its own psychic terms, is never only inward turning; it also contains a historical reference in so far as it involves, alongside the attempt to arrest the present, a journey through the past’, and (iii) that ‘fantasy can be grounds for license and pleasure’. The intention is to think through contemporary cultural practices in ways that continue to aid the historical desire to ‘blast open the future’. The paper is intended to acknowledge, pay tribute to, and critically engage with kwaito musicians, even those who prefer the nomenclature of ‘dawgs’, whether the dogs in question be ‘pimps, hustlers [or] playas’. The accolades are for the intricate mix of players that produce and consume kwaito music in ways that ensure that its ‘ridim an tings’ continue to rule the swing in townships across South Africa. Kwaito projects are initiated and created largely under the control of young people, many of them drawn from the ranks of the lumpenproletariat in working class communities. Consequently, kwaito is profoundly shot through with an urban, and often Sowetan, sensibility. Kwaito is an eloquent testimony of the agency of young blacks, especially their desires to create their own narratives and meanings in response to the harsh and hostile urban landscapes in which they find themselves. Invigorated by their own streetwise insights and skills, as well as cultural developments elsewhere on the globe, young blacks seek to humanise their experiences of the pleasures and pains of urbanity. At the same time uneasy with and celebratory of their ghetto

Kwaito, ‘dawgs' and the antimonies of hustling

Images and influence: the role of film in representing Johannesburg and shaping everyday practice in the city

Migration: challenges and experiences of the Ethiopian Diaspora in the city of Johannesburg (2000-2015) and the role of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s Ministry.

Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (eds) (2000) Senses of Culture: South African culture studies

Citations

Multilingualism in transformative spaces: contact and conviviality

Writing white on black : modernism as discursive paradigm in South African writing on modern Black art

Kwaito, ‘dawgs' and the antimonies of hustling

Images and influence: the role of film in representing Johannesburg and shaping everyday practice in the city

Migration: challenges and experiences of the Ethiopian Diaspora in the city of Johannesburg (2000-2015) and the role of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s Ministry.

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