The home of Afro-American music: Los Angeles and the creation of Hugh Masekela’s anticolonial sound

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this paper, using an African Internationalist framework, I examine the life and cultural work of Hugh Masekela and his record label Chisa Records during his time in Los Angeles, from 1966 to 1976. From the wake of the Watts Rebellion and to the eve of the Soweto Uprising, for Masekela and other African musicians in exile, life in Los Angeles deepened their bonds with African American culture. Life in Los Angeles bridged the space between African liberation and Black Power. More importantly it sustained the anti-apartheid movement in exile. Masekela’s record label was promoted as the “Home of Afro-American Music”. Masekela and his label challenged what I call the collective culture settler colonialism that I define as the white global spatial imaginary. Masekela and other Chisa artists, both South African and African American, generated an internationalist and anticolonial cultural practice that I call the Black global spatial imaginary. In sound, aesthetics, and political practice the Black global spatial imaginary linked Black liberation struggles in Southern California to those in Southern Africa.