Political aesthetics and embodiment: Sung protest in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, freedom songs and accompanying dances played a critical role in mass mobilizations to combat apartheid and they continue to flourish post-apartheid. Using ethnographic studies of collective demonstrations in the Johannesburg metropolitan area between 2009 and 2010, this article investigates the continued salience of such performances for contemporary protesters. The author argues that the political significance of freedom songs involves not only their eruption as a critique of a broader society, but also their varied contributions toward a shared sensory disposition and sensibility among the marginalized. If, as French philosopher Jacques Rancière states, politics is an eruption or break away from the sensible, then attention to song embodiment reveals regenerative possibilities that exist along with the transgressive potential of political performances. An embodied consideration of political aesthetics therefore expands analysis of political intervention as not only transgressive but also as generative of personhood and collectivity.