Between Tinseltown and Sophiatown: The Double Temporality of Popular Culture in the Autobiographical Cultural Memory of Bloke Modisane and Miriam Makeba

Abstract

Prompted by Paul Gilroy’s question as to how active remembrance in black expressive culture is associated with a distinctive and disjunctive temporality (1993: 212), this article brings to view divided autobiographical subjectivities through the problematic, if double, temporality of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963) and Miriam Makeba’s Makeba: My Story (1988) such as they are framed between popular culture and figures of memory that straddle Tinseltown and Sophiatown. It does so by referring to these two prominent Sophiatown figures’ preoccupation with voyaging – discursively through figures of memory and bodiographically – in performative Hollywood en route to exile in the geopolitical West. The two autobiographical texts that record each moment of the memoric and material journeys – entries and exits – effectively bear witness to rhizomatic alliances that are foregrounded by Hollywood-mediated agential discourses of performativity. The paper concludes that the signifying time of Modisane’s and Makeba’s self-representation is doubled by temporal and spatial deixes of both Tinseltown and Sophiatown in general and the margins of reconstructive memory and spectatorship of cinematic popular culture in particular.