Kwaito, a hybrid genre of music formalized in South Africa that draws on marabi, kwela, and mbaqanga as well as more explicitly international genres of house, hip hop, and R&B, emerged from practices of remixing that became popular in the 1980s and took the national and at times international stage in the 1990s. While kwaito is often derided as an apolitical, consumerist genre, embraced by a generation seeking to escape the traumatic histories of struggle for freedom in South Africa, it importantly took shape coterminously with the political uprisings that brought about the fall of the white supremacist apartheid project and the turmoil of establishing and contesting a post-apartheid reality. In Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Xavier Livermon mines these very politics and shows how they offer resources for realizing liberation beyond neoliberal and capitalist inclusion currently shaping post-apartheid South Africa.
Livermon makes an...
