Research Seminar - Warrick Moses , Thursday 4th March, 11am

4 Mar 2021

Voice of the Cape: Reclaiming Landscape Through the Sound of Cape Town-Based Hiphop.

Thursday 4th March - 11am. Email music@ucc.ie for the Teams Link.

Abstract

In this presentation I propose a way of theorizing how “mixed-race” or “coloured” hiphop practitioners in the greater Cape Town area, (re-)inhabit zones of the city proper that have been restricted through historical legislative practice, and contemporarily through social practice.  I discuss the expulsion of non-white communities from the city via the 1950 Group Areas Act (GAA) as a conspicuous example of “de-territorialization.” With “re-territorialization” on the other hand, I explain how physical space is ideologically reclaimed through sound, and in particular, the auditory experience of vernacular Afrikaans, or Kaaps. This sonic intervention - an “acoustic re-territorialization” - is a critical aspect in my study of racial and language identity in Cape Town and imagines how a disenfranchised social grouping might reconfigure its relationship to landscape, through a conscious and pragmatic emphasis instead, on soundscape.

My argument rests on the following proposals: 1) that a physical re-population of the city by working-class coloured communities is logistically impossible, given the insurmountable challenge posed by contemporary neo-liberal economic practice; and 2) that agents, through an engaged relationship with sound, of personal memory and of movement, can “make their own place” of a physical environment. This mode of “acoustic knowing” centers coloured communities firmly in the regions to which they have historically been relegated, inculcating a “sense of place” and affinity (positive or negative) with an imposed physical base. However, it also holds out the potential for these communities to contravene geo-spatial proscriptions, and thus, to construct belonging or emplacement on their own terms, within alternative locales.