The ears of apartheid

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers white popular music of the 1950s and 1960s as a zone of what J.M. Coetzee has termed apartheid’s confessional “heart-speech” – a zone that explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, I show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped aesthetic sensibility for disavowing black sonic presence, arguing that this may account for one way in which the madness of apartheid spread through the social body. Popular music propagated the madness of apartheid not by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematising racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws: all under the cover of background entertainment. Out of this listening praxis, a perverted white ear took shape that heard “whiteness” whenever confronted with difference, and “home” when confronted with the sonic presence of the racial other.