In Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Xavier Livermon provides a novel perspective on kwaito music and the youth culture it spawned. In Livermon's rendition, kwaito bodies emerge as a form of self-fashioning whereby South Africa's ‘born free’ generation negotiate a place of freedom amidst enduring structural constraints. Kwaito, a style of music similar to hip-hop that emerged in 1990s Soweto, generated establishment unease in postapartheid South Africa as it flaunted social, sexual, and political orthodoxies. Livermon describes his monograph as ‘the first post-apartheid study of self-fashioning and the mediation of the body and pleasure that arises from the practices of popular performance and social dance’ (11). It is an enticing promise, and the book does not disappoint.
Livermon frames the analysis by appropriating a technical term from musical production — ‘remaster’ — which the author then imbues with new meaning and uses it as a red thread through the text. ‘Remastering’ involves taking an original source and clearing up its imperfections, without adding new elements. Livermon applies this term to youth alienation and aspiration in postapartheid South Africa. Through the eyes of his interlocuters, Livermon sees continuity, not rupture, with the inequalities of the country's apartheid and colonial past and speculates about what freedom has and might look like, as experienced through kwaito and the embodied experiences of black, youthful South African bodies.
The scene-setting first chapter, ‘Afrodiasporic Space’, unpacks a controversy around the kwaito band Boom Shaka's performance of the national anthem, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ Afrika’, which was criticized by some as un-South African for its perceived foreign influence as well as for being ‘disrespectful’ because of its unconventional kwaito rendition and erotically charged performance. Livermon argues that the controversy was a revealing snapshot, in that far from being un-South African, the performance represented a zone of imaginative possibility for black South African youth and exposed a generational rift and rejection of bourgeois respectability. In this and subsequent chapters, Livermon skillfully uses kwaito-related incidents, artists, performances, and venues to reveal their larger meaning and significance as black South African youth negotiate their place in the postapartheid social order.
The next chapter, ‘Jozi Nights’, explores a series of encounters and the multiple, albeit circumscribed, ways in which kwaito culture has enabled moments of contact and mixture across class, racial, and gendered divides. This chapter is more geographically and spatially oriented than the others. In it, Livermon demonstrates how night clubs are sites of encounter that allow for possibilities outside the strictures of the everyday — spaces where kwaito bodies disrupt the hierarchies and social cleavages based on race, class, and gender.
One criticism leveled against kwaito culture is that it appears to eschew politics and embrace conspicuous consumption. In Chapter Three, ‘Sis-ghetto Fabulous’, Livermon situates conspicuous consumption in the context of thwarted material aspirations. If an older generation frowns on the perceived frivolity, materialism, and pursuit of pleasure exemplified by kwaito, Livermon sees an expression of alternative modes of freedom through consumption for disaffected youth. This is a persuasive argument, grounded in vivid ethnographic detail.
The next two chapters explore the self-conscious, gendered performances of two prominent Kwaito stars, Lebo Mathosa and Mandoza, both of whom died young. By evoking tropes such as ‘dangerous woman’, ‘family man’, and ‘hypermasculine gangster’, Livermon contends that Mathosa and Mandoza embodied the limits and possibilities of gendered performance, including space for queer desire. In his analysis of parties associated with Youth Day (which commemorates youth's role in the anti-apartheid struggle), Livermon shows how these kwaito-related events enable youth to connect with a reimagined past and forge alternative futures. He shows how the well-known band Mafikizolo engaged with the past by incorporating and reinterpreting aspects of South African history as well as queering tradition — for example, by simultaneously incorporating Vintage Cru (a queer dance troupe) with traditional dance and dress in a music video for the song ‘Khona’ that became a pan-African hit (notwithstanding the pervasive notion that queer subjectivities are ‘un-African’). It is this encounter between ‘a vast array of sexual identities and practices’ that positions kwaito as a terrain of possibility (221). In closing, Livermon observes that kwaito bodies reveal that in postapartheid South Africa ‘freedom is complex and uncomfortable, but also that it is incomplete’. (234)
It is on this last point that the author's contribution is most provocative. Livermon reports that by offering his body to kwaito through dance, engagement with interlocuters, personal experience, and emotional engagement, he learned the most valuable lessons about freedom in postapartheid South Africa. He does an excellent job of conveying these insights through rich ethnography and analysis of cultural trends. At its best the book is like kwaito — improvised, hybrid, unexpected, vibrant, even flashy. But there is a didactic element that seems out of sync with the innovative form. In contrast to the nuance of his ethnographic engagement and multilayered reading of kwaito culture, the postapartheid social order looms as something of a neoliberal monolith in Livermon’ s account. It is against this unnuanced, monochromatic backdrop that the loud, improvised, innovative, subversive, and always danceable kwaito emerges as barometer of youth aspiration, both realized and disappointed.
Livermon includes concepts of Afrodiasporic space, as well as racialized colonialism and heteropatriarchy, in this relatively unnuanced engagement with the specificity and complexity of South Africa's history in relation to race and class. Understandably, books need shorthand, but such grand narratives are too often heavy-handed and do not jive well with the nuance and rhythmic sway of the kwaito beat that permeates the rest of the text. The author himself alludes to this, as a precaution, signaling that ‘the diaspora analytic is not meant to be a totalizing narrative that obliterates alternative understandings of the post-apartheid South African nation’ (56). Except, at times, it does.
That critique aside, perhaps Livermon's signal contribution is how he queers kwaito through his own positionality as a participant observer, by mapping queer desire and aesthetics, and by embedding questions of sexuality in discussions of the meaning and import of kwaito for black South African youth. There is queer space in kwaito, and there is subversive, even transformative, potential in incorporating manifestations of queer desire in kwaito. This is a refreshing perspective, locating queer subjectivity within the vicissitudes of the mainstream rather than in discrete identarian terms. Remastering embraces a paradox of limits and possibilities — a better rendition of the same master copy. It is in this terrain of structural constraint and youth agency that Livermon has imaginatively interpreted kwaito and its creative possibilities.
