Abstract
ABSTRACT This article considers white popular music of the 1950s and 1960s as a zone of what J.M. Coetzee has termed apartheid’s confessional “heart-speech” – a zone that explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, I show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped aesthetic sensibility for disavowing black sonic presence, arguing that this may account for one way in which the madness of apartheid spread through the social body. Popular music propagated the madness of apartheid not by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematising racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws: all under the cover of background entertainment. Out of this listening praxis, a perverted white ear took shape that heard “whiteness” whenever confronted with difference, and “home” when confronted with the sonic presence of the racial other.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
