Louise Meintjes

Paul Simon's Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning

The presence of style indicates strong community, an intense sociability that has been given shape through time, an assertion of control over collective feelings so powerful that any expressive innovator will necessarily put his or her content into that shaping continuum and no other. (Keil 1985:122)

Shoot the sergeant, shatter the mountain: The production of masculinity in zulu ngoma song and dance in post-apartheid South Africa

The paper situates Zulu ngoma song and dance within the related worlds of state and gender politics in post-apartheid South Africa. It poses as its problem the difficulty of retaining the presence of individualized expression and stylized body movement in an analysis that also situates “the body” politically and theorizes it phenomenologically. In the midst of unemployment, an AIDS epidemic and a history of violence in rural KwaZulu-Natal, ngoma is a critical means to attaining responsible manhood.