Remixing Race after Apartheid by Inglese, Francesca;

Long description:

The first in-depth study of Kaapse klopse, a carnival tradition in South Africa

Remixing Race after Apartheid is the first ethnographic monograph centered on Kaapse klopse, a South African carnival tradition, and it uses this genre as a critical lens to explore how sound mediates racial identity in the postapartheid era. Drawing on immersive fieldwork, interviews, and performance analysis, the book employs methods from sensory ethnography, sound studies, and critical race theory to foreground participants' lived experiences and aesthetic practices.

The study reveals how klopse has expanded since apartheid's end, particularly among youth and women, serving as a site of cultural resistance and self-making. Participants use klopse to respond to the racial and spatial legacies of apartheid and to marginalization within the everyday social, political, and economic conditions in which they live.

Challenging the reductive portrayals of klopse as either escapist or criminal, the book critiques the use of imported aesthetic categories and instead centers local meaning-making. Remixing Race shows how klopse operates as a dynamic, multisensory space where performers negotiate identity, history, and belonging—without collapsing their creativity into identity politics or erasing their social positioning. It offers a model for how ethnographic and sonic methodologies can illuminate the affective and political dimensions of racialized cultural expression.

"Remixing Race after Apartheid is a beautifully written ethnography, balancing multiple perspectives on carnival and community-building among the 'coloured' population in South Africa's Kaapse klopse. Inglese's skillful synthesis explores the understanding (and misunderstanding) of race and identity in local and global contexts."—Noel Lobley, author of Sound Fragments: From Field Recording to African Electronic Stories

"This book provides a nuanced and lively history of the Kaapse klopse (Clubs of the Cape) and their Carnival practices in Cape Town and its townships, using indigenous concepts and terminology to document processes of cultural and musical fusion. An important and highly original study that both elucidates ways in which the Carnival music lends meaning and value to its local community while creatively challenging binary views of music and race."—Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Research Professor of Music and professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments

Companion Website

Note on Language

Introduction: Voorsmakie

ONE—Remaking Race and Value in the Era of "Nonracialism"

TWO—Goema's Cape Town: Carnival and the Reclamation of Space

THREE—Sonic Orientation: Sociality and Inauthenticity in Sentimentals

FOUR–Moeniel's Open Ears: Deurmekaar Sociality, Openness, and Remix in Moppies

FIVE —Nostalgia for an Imagined Future: "Coon Songs" and the Legacy of Blackface Minstrelsy

SIX—Struggling for Value in the Neoliberal City

Epilogue: Back-March

Notes

Bibliography

Index