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

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.

Willemien Froneman is an Associate Professor in the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research in Innovation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, where she also heads up the postgraduate degree programmes and leads an interdisciplinary cohort of postgraduate researchers and fellows. She holds degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Stellenbosch. Her interests extend from American music experimentalism to notions of avant-gardism and modernity in the Global South. Much of her published research is about whiteness and affect as these concerns relate to popular music vernaculars in South Africa. As the former editor of South African Music Studies, she has worked towards finding new forms of decolonial academic publishing that renders visible the realities of South African institutions and scholarly concerns.