Kwaito's Promise by Gavin Steingo

Kwaito's Promise by Gavin Steingo

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.
           
Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Gavin Steingo is Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University and the author of Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa.

Jim Sykes is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226362540
ISBN 10	022636254X
Title	Kwaito's Promise
Author	Gavin Steingo
Series	Chicago Studies In Ethnomusicology Cse
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	2016-06-21
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.