Over the Rainbow? Performing Contemporary South Africa

Abstract

Democratic South Africa, just over two decades old, is unavoidably complex, intrinsically hybrid and, as this thesis will argue, anxiously performative. This thesis undertakes to examine bodily practices at key times in contemporary South Africa where national engagement—however divisive or complex—has been centred. It offers a nuanced reading of national performance practices: a reading that considers bodies as both historical constructs and sets of cultural possibilities. Indeed, it is to bodies and embodiment that I look throughout this thesis: the heightened moments or events which reveal tangible, grounded practices behind what I will style as the Geertzian sensibility of the ‘new’ South Africa itself. I argue that this sensibility and the material practices that make up what Geertz termed a “matrix of sensibility” are characterised by both anxiety and performativity – a curious feeling that privileges an extraordinary literacy to reading the body. With the inherent communication difficulties of eleven official languages, South African bodies are the pre-eminent site of national struggle, not only as the bearer of representation—the symbolic gesture of a single raised fist or toyi-toyi protest dance—but as the means of resistance and the enactment of struggle in confrontation or incarceration. I will argue that South Africans are, for reasons both political and practical, particularly attuned towards the nuances of bodies—their skins, their gender, their class—but also their movements, to the processes of embodiment. That even the whitest sporting events resound with the call-and-response strains of an onomatopoeic mining workers’ song speaks to the calling to, and feeling for, an embodied sense of nation. From metaphor to movement, creative expression—often embodied, always imaginative—has been the marker of a national mood. In the following pages, then, I will examine a diverse set of case studies that reveal this sensibility, using them as tethering points for a national cross-narrative constantly created by and through bodies themselves. Rather than demanding strict thematic homologies, I focus on analogues of engagement, discerning a way of seeing and being nation that showcases spectacles of power struggle playing out at the level of the critically anxious South African body. Consequently, this work considers figures such as controversial sprinters Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya, carefully connecting their cultural impact to, amongst others, the parliamentary political disruptions by the Economic Freedom Fighters party, the music of rap-rave music group Die Antwoord, Tweede Nuwe Jaar street carnivals and, finally, waves of recent student protest action under the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall banners.