Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa

For several centuries Cape Town has accommodated a great variety of musical genres which have usually been associated with specific population groups living in and around the city. Musical styles and genres produced in Cape Town have therefore been assigned an "identity" which is first and foremost social. This volume tries to question the relationship established between musical styles and genres, and social - in this case pseudo-racial - identities. In Sounding the Cape, Denis-Constant Martin recomposes and examines through the theoretical prism of creolisation the history of music in Cape Town, deploying analytical tools borrowed from the most recent studies of identity configurations. He demonstrates that musical creation in the Mother City, and in South Africa, has always been nurtured by contacts, exchanges and innovations whatever the efforts made by racist powers to separate and divide people according to their origin. Musicians interviewed at the dawn of the 21st century confirm that mixture and blending characterise all Cape Town's musics. They also emphasise the importance of a rhythmic pattern particular to Cape Town, the ghoema beat, whose origins are obviously mixed. The study of music demonstrates that the history of Cape Town, and of South Africa as a whole, undeniably fostered creole societies. Yet, twenty years after the collapse of apartheid, these societies are still divided along lines that combine economic factors and "racial" categorisations. Martin concludes that, were music given a greater importance in educational and cultural policies, it could contribute to fighting these divisions and promote the notion of a nation that, in spite of the violence of racism and apartheid, has managed to invent a unique common culture.

DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN was until 2016 an Outstanding Research Fellow of the French National Foundation for Political Science. He was successively attached to the Paris Centre of International Studies, then to the Bordeaux centre Les Afriques dans le monde. He was a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) at Stellenbosch University (2007, 2013 and 2015). His research focused on the relationship between culture and politics. After doing ¿eldwork in Eastern Africa, the Commonwealth Caribbean and the United States, he studied the New Year Festivals in Cape Town, with a special interest in the musics of the Kaapse Klopse and the Malay Choirs. He has published many academic articles and books, including: Coon Carnival, New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present (David Philip, 1999) and Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (African Minds, 2013).