The Groovology of White Affect: Boeremusiek and the Enregisterment of Race in South Africa (2024)

By: Willemien Froneman

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Synopsis: The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race formation in South Africa from a position immersed in the sonic. Mining boeremusiek’s “heart-speech” across two centuries of reception, the book offers a theory of race formation steeped in the music’s vernacular language and practices, and in the context of South Africa's race ideologies. The book’s chapters identifys and explore boeremusiek's affective modalities: embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The book then theorizes indexicality, music, affect and whiteness as three interlinked ontologies. When considered together, the book argues, boeremusiek’s modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as a matter of prejudice, but as a matter of (conditional) pleasure and (pathological) taste. The Groovology of White Affect articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way—amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism—for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism.