Battles over borders: Hiphop and the politics and poetics of race and place in the new South Africa

On the basis of one year's anthropological fieldwork, my dissertation explores the diverse ways in which South African youth, in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and the surrounding townships, appropriate, translate and perform globally circulating hiphop musical-cultural forms as a means of negotiating new and old identities and social positions of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, in late and post-apartheid South Africa. Spanning hiphop's twenty-year (1982-2002) South African history, the dissertation, more specifically, explores the various ways in which South African youth articulate relationships between the 'local' and the 'global', the 'modern' and 'traditional', race, class, ethnicity, nationality and 'hiphop nation' belonging through hiphop performativity. The making and unmaking of race, ethnicity, identity, and place in the new South Africa is situated in the context of emerging post-apartheid social divisions and tensions and the globalization of media, communications, and popular culture. Whilst foregrounding the everyday context of intensifying South African youth 'battles over borders' (of identity and community), as these find expression in and through competing interpretations and invocations of hiphop's 'genre rules' of authenticity, I furthermore examine the key role and impact of state and corporate institutional actors (including the transnational media and entertainment industry) in managing, distributing and shaping of South African youth cultural forms and meanings. The ways in which such globally circulating hiphop musical-cultural forms have helped to mould resistance in South Africa are moreover highlighted, as are the historical contexts for, and broader socio-political consequences of, hiphop's growing following in South Africa. By way of conclusion, the concept of Black Globality is developed and proposed as an alternative framework for understanding the shifting, multiple, and varied bases of identity and affiliation articulated among hiphoppers globally. Against charges of African American cultural imperialism, I contend that the uneven translations and highly contested re-inscriptions of a globally circulating hiphop 'grammar of blackness' are prompting a timely meditation on the basis of identity and community in the post-apartheid era.