Fatty Boom Boom and the Transnationality of Blackface in Die Antwoord's Racial Project

Abstract

The South African hip hop group Die Antwoord deploys blackface performance as part of a racial project that characterizes race as contingent and mutable in contrast to its rigid apartheid articulation. Examining the flows that carry their work transnationally makes visible the ways US cultural consumption becomes entangled with processes of racialization.