Kwaitoscapes: Reading the historio-graphic narratives in the visual cultures of black youth

Abstract

The argument in this thesis is this: The kwaito music video can be an audiovisual disruptor that recasts and sometimes challenges sociopolitical norms. This study examines the optic narratives in kwaito’s visual culture – with a special focus on the music video. The kwaito music video contributes scantly to scholarship about the music video genre on the African continent. As such, in addition to the exploration of kwaito’s aesthetics, this study deepens ‘our’ reading of the kwaito music video’s narration of notions of gender, race and nationalism as they intersect with technological, economic and political imperatives (Emoresele 2022). This study encompasses two interrelated parts: the production two essayistic videos, and a reflective dissertation to advocate and advance what is understood as artistic research from the ‘Global South’. This interdiscursive study is interested in the manner in which kwaito music video grammar is shot through a historio-graphic lens and modality, that requires a reading of kwaito visual culture within a broader constellation of trans-local black cultural practices, visual and otherwise. The kwaito music video reflects and responds to visual motifs found in music videos for South African musical/cultural practices such as ‘bubblegum’, as well as those in Caribbean and North American black music, especially reggae, R & B and hip-hop. Yet, the visual practices within the kwaito music video are not limited to musical genres, but are essential to musicking practices, which are always if not increasingly visual. As such, within a complex set of dynamics in nationalist global popular culture, kwaito visual cultures represent both the positions of black youth, as well as how black youth not only negotiate their place in the so-called global village but also go about claiming their stakes therein (Musila 2022). It is worth thinking about how kwaito visual culture flips the dearth of nationalist grammar as an opportunity to re-map the topographies and visual markers that constitute black cultural work within global popular culture (ibid.: 4). Kwaito visual culture continues to redefine its visual vocabulary to contradict, complicate and reconceive of nationalist visual ideas and identities. It does this through what I term historio- graphic kwaitoscapes – a writing of histories that produce interdiscursive plura-literary texts (Quayson 1997). Historio-graphic kwaitoscapes are a cyclic writing – from the ground, to the lyric, to the screen, and back again.