Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how political identification and collective solidarity are cultivated through the embodied aesthetics of song. I elaborate activists’ attempts to adapt the singing legacy of anti-apartheid struggles to changing political challenges of the post-apartheid neo-liberal dispensation.

Paper long abstract:

South African freedom songs and accompanying dances played a critical role in mass mobilizations to combat apartheid and controversially continue to flourish well after apartheid's demise. These repertoires offer crucial resources for mobilization, evoking political investments in the present by invoking the unresolved past. Considering South Africa as a massively traumatized society (Robben 2005), memory is all the more politicized. The process of inclusion and exclusion—of populations and experiences—factors not just in re-collecting the

shared past but also in how the present is sensed and rendered sensible. Song factors in such a nation's memory politics as an aesthetic realm through which pain or trauma, ineffable as these experiences often are, can "exit into semiosis" (Daniel 1994:239). Songs become encoded with experience taking on a meaning that can be particularly individual and cement a collective bond.

This paper examines how political identification and collective solidarity are cultivated through the embodied aesthetics of song. I elaborate activists' attempts to adapt the singing legacy of anti-apartheid struggles to changing political challenges of the post-apartheid neo-liberal dispensation. Within this, I choose two conflicts to analyze in detail. The first involves a disjuncture between sound form and lyrical content when activists lambasted their opponents with astoundingly vulgar lyrics sung through mellifluous melodies. The second involves a refusal of memory—the denial of history's passing—when different protesters revived profoundly plaintive apartheid-era songs to voice current grievances. Through both moments, I aim to understand how divergent political sentiments are aesthetically configured through embodied sound.