ABSTRACT

This article considers white popular music of the 1950s and 1960s as a zone of what J.M. Coetzee has termed apartheid’s confessional “heart-speech” – a zone that explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, I show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped aesthetic sensibility for disavowing black sonic presence, arguing that this may account for one way in which the madness of apartheid spread through the social body. Popular music propagated the madness of apartheid not by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematising racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws: all under the cover of background entertainment. Out of this listening praxis, a perverted white ear took shape that heard “whiteness” whenever confronted with difference, and “home” when confronted with the sonic presence of the racial other.

摘要

本文将 1950 年代和 1960 年代的白人流行音乐视为 JM Coetzee 称之为种族隔离的忏悔“心语”的一个区域——一个阐明对种族隔离及其种族否认病态的声音层理解的区域。借鉴彼得·斯洛特迪克 (Peter Sloterdijk) 的作品，我展示了为背景娱乐而创作的白人流行音乐如何在白人耳朵中培养出一种扭曲的审美敏感性，以否认黑人声音的存在，并认为这可能解释了种族隔离的疯狂在社会中传播的一种方式身体。流行音乐不是通过在音乐上代表种族隔离来传播种族隔离的疯狂，而是通过将日常生活中的种族交集主题化，以及通过表演和体现种族隔离法明确禁止的白人对黑人身体的变态欲望：一切都在背景娱乐的掩护下。在这种聆听实践中，一只变态的白耳朵形成了，每当面对差异时，它就会听到“白色”，而当面对种族他者的声音存在时，它会听到“家”。