Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa by Gavin Steingo (review)

What is kwaito? In Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa, Gavin Steingo resists defining this music as a bounded genre, describing it instead as "a particular arrangement of sensory experiences" (p. 21) and a form of experimentation. At the moment of South Africa's transition to democracy, the word kwaito, which had to that point signified international house music, came to refer to the locally produced electronic music that was emerging with the democratization of production. Decades later, however, that moment's promise of imminent equality remains unfulfilled. This contradiction—between the implementation of a democratic political system and the continuation of material inequality between South African citizens—is central to the relationship between aesthetics and freedom, one that, as the title suggests, is at the core of this book.

In a pointed critique of music studies, Steingo highlights the resonance between local criticism of kwaito's failure to address social concerns and scholarly efforts—grounded in the belief that aesthetic judgments are ultimately interested social ones—to uncover the reality behind claims to aesthetic autonomy. He argues that this work of demystification, more than the act of aesthetic listening, is itself an exercise of power. Steingo's, then, is not a recuperative project, seeking to prove any true politics behind kwaito; instead, he asks us to take kwaito's producers at their word, forego the search for truth, and embrace what emerges from his synthesis of ethnography and critical theory as "aesthetics' anarchic principle" (p. 89). To do this work, he draws heavily on Western aesthetic theory, particularly the work of Jacques Rancière, yet his ethnographic material nuances these frameworks, and his commitment to taking the words and worlds of his interlocutors seriously, rather than finding the meaning behind them, is an important corrective to the way ethnography is sometimes harnessed to predetermined analytical ends within music studies. He shows that the illusion of aesthetic autonomy doubles, rather than obscures, social realities, creating multiple truths and new sensory realities. He sees this as a deliberate move to suspend normative ways of hearing and knowing, one that emerges from the desire to "see or hear from the perspective of someone whose attention is not entirely concentrated on actual oppressive conditions" (p. 15). Kwaito's politics lie in this separation between sensory experience and actual social conditions. In Steingo's relation of this point to (African) claims about the imbrication of musical performance and social life in Africa, as well as in his incorporation of African cosmologies into his analysis, we catch brief glimpses of a model for an African aesthetics that is hinted at in the book's introduction.

The book's significant theoretical interventions emerge through Steingo's exposition of a wealth of previously unavailable material on the inner workings of kwaito. He outlines the early (pre)history of kwaito during apartheid as an encounter with the international outside that symbolized freedom. He confronts established narratives about kwaito (as local South African music, as a slowed-down form of house music, and so forth), shows how the music changed over the decades since the transition to nonracial democracy, describes important figures in its emergence, and examines the key platforms for its regional and national distribution. Challenging common readings of African expressive cultures as localizations of globalized US music, he highlights the specificity of circulation and blockages in apartheid and postapartheid South Africa, showing how kwaito disrupts, rather than consolidates, ethnic, racial, and national identities.

Steingo draws upon extended ethnographic fieldwork in Soweto to examine the dynamic between kwaito as a professional, mass-mediated popular music and a nonprofessional activity. In doing so, he challenges romantic assumptions that link technology with democratized and unfettered flows of music, arguing that immobility, rather than mobility, characterizes circulation in Soweto, yet without reverting to the optimistic interpretations that he is keen to subvert, he shows that regardless of intentionality, musical technologies...