The Groovology of White Affect

The Groovology of White Affect theorizes white aesthetics and race-formation in South Africa from a perspective rooted in the sonic. The book treats music, affect and whiteness as three interlinked commandeering ontologies. It offers a music-based theory of race formation steeped in boeremusiek's incredibly rich vernacular language and practices, and with South Africa's race ideologies always simmering in the background. The first few chapters each identifies and explores one of boeremusiek's pragmatic affective registers: embarrassment, blackface, epiphany, and disavowal. The final chapter argues that, when considered together, these modalities outline the parameters of a corrupted white aesthetic faculty that help explain how whiteness perpetuates itself in the present day. Racism is thereby defined not primarily as matter of prejudice, but as a matter of pleasure and a matter of taste. The book also articulates a sound studies from the South; it is an attempt to write in a South Africa-centered way - amidst the collapse of colonial disciplines and a resulting disciplinary and methodological catholicism - for a broad, international audience interested in the affective constitution of race and racism.