Popular culture in South Africa: The limits of black identity in 'Drum' magazine.

摘要

My dissertation investigates ten years of Drum magazine to understand how urban black South Africans, in the 1950s, made use of changes in the post-World-War modes of social production to resist and subvert the cultural limits that apartheid and a history of settler-colonialism imposed on a black identity.;In Drum, a loosely bounded black identity differentiates it from the way identity is understood within the political frames of Negritude, Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and apartheid. Questions of power, appropriation, and alienation are posed in a context that is open-ended and contingent. They define a different cultural politics from the absolutes of race, ethnicity, and nation.;I study the movements of black identity as blacks migrate from the country to the city, from tribal structures of feeling to modern industrial ones, and from white Euro-centric standards of subjectivity to racially hybrid, black, diasporic, cultural identities.;I proceed by locating the question of a black identity at the crossroads of political, racial, and economic oppression. I then show that an identity of resistance is an identity in difference. It can only be fashioned through migratory cultural connections that take us beyond ethnic and national boundaries. I suggest that the black identity in difference, represented in Drum , is a familiar human identity, consistent with the modes of modern social production of its time.;In my reflection, I consider how commoditized cultural images from a black diaspora extend the imaginative capacity of black South Africans to construct new identities. I argue that a black identity connects to a black diasporic identity and to an abstract modern identity. It finds its cultural recognition in a systemic frame that is wider than South Africa. And within this system, the black identity affirms a cultural closeness of meaning between black and white. In the popular imagination, images of style, that contrast sharply with black material conditions, register an undeniable claim to equal cultural value with other modern cultural identities.