The Inaudible Nation: Music and Sensory Perception in Postapartheid South Africa

In both the social sciences and humanities, it is something of a truism that nations are not only audible but downright loquacious. From a basic phenomenological perspective, this position seems accurate: from the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games to State of the Nation addresses and seasonal national music festivals held in many countries around the world, the ubiquity of national or nationalist sound is a contemporary commonplace, or even a cliché. In addition to the proclamation that nations resound, a number of detailed studies in history, anthropology, sociology, and ethnomusicology have traced the mechanisms by which states employ sonic and musical material. At the risk of oversimplification, the most common theorization holds that states create national unity (and by extension, repress difference) by reifying specific "folk" traditions. It is precisely because particular cultural practices are reified in and by the modern state that they are referred to as "invented" (see Hobsbawm and Ranger).

In this article I suggest that the dominant position on the audibility of nations outlined above does not adequately explain late twentieth-century liberal-democratic nation-states. Based on my experience both as a white South African who lived through the democratic transition and as an ethnomusicologist who has conducted "formal" ethno-graphic research in that country, this paper seeks to complicate the orthodox view of nationalism, music, and sensory perception by pointing to the rupture between sonic matter and national belonging in late twentieth-century national and nationalist politics. Going against the grain of orthodox theorization, I suggest that postapartheid, liberal-democratic South Africa was made possible only by neutralizing sensory perception and thus, in a sense, becoming inaudible.

Of course, this neutralization was never, can never be, total. In the face of "inaudibility," particular racial, ethnic, and class interests continue to exert pressure and in certain cases attempt to claim sensory dominance. My aim in this paper is to examine the antagonism between particular social groups, on the one hand, and the neutralization of their particular interests, on the other. But I will insist throughout that this antagonism is crucial for our understanding of South African nationalism and that, moreover, an exclusively empirical analysis of music and sound is not adequate. As John Mowitt has recently argued, despite the recent boom in sound studies, "It seems many scholars are making noise about sound but often in ways that feel resolutely empirical" (2011, 168). By theorizing South African nationalism through inaudibility (and not merely through various audibles), I hope to move the discourse beyond empiricism and toward a deeper reflection on the contemporary politics of music and sound.

Consider the following example: when the African National Congress (ANC) attained political power in 1994 it sought to foster national unity not by instrumentalizing specific traditions but by advocating nonracialism and reconciliation. President Nelson Mandela, along with Bishop Desmond Tutu, promoted the vision of a "Rainbow Nation" to which South Africans of all cultural backgrounds could belong. The section on national identity in the ANC's "Constitutional Guidelines for a Democratic South Africa" opens:

It shall be state policy to promote the growth of a single national identity and loyalty binding on all South Africans. At the same time, the state shall recognize linguistic and cultural diversity of the people and provide facilities for free linguistic and cultural development.

(Qtd. in Frederikse, 254)

How is unity attained at the same time as diversity? The answer can be formulated in this way: in a set whose members are completely different, the only thing that unifies the members of the set is that they are in the set.¹ South African nationalism is thus strictly tautological: South Africans are South African as long as they are South African. Black or white, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight,² rich or poor: if someone is South African, then he or she is South African. Although South Africa has probably assumed this form of nationalism more forcefully than other nations, I show later in this paper that "tautological nationalism" is the liberal ideal of the nation-state.

The South African...