Musical Space as Site of Transculturation of Memory and Transformation of Consciousness: The re-affirmation of Africa in the Black Atlantic Assemblage

Abstract

This article argues that the recent meteoric emergence of trends such as hip hop and other popular genres in South Africa is a simultaneous internationalization and indigenization of representational temporalities. The connection with Afro-American music, for example, is a fulfillment of commercial imperatives of market success through multinational companies such as SONY, as well as a conscious effort to assert an African idiom through South African indigenous languages and signature beats from the rest of Africa. The article shows how, from the early days of Miriam Makeba’s address to the United Nations and performances in New York in the 1950s to Beyonce Knowles’ renditions supporting the noble cause of the United Nations recently, a new form of aesthetic transformation globalizes recognizable homologies of Africa and the Black Atlantic assemblage.