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

This paper concerns an urgent and pressing question of widespread interest across a broad range of theoretical domains: what are the affective and sensorial dimensions of political communities? More specifically, it inquires into the relationship between political belonging, cultural difference, and the medium of sound. Grounding these issues and questions in the context of contemporary South Africa, I elucidate the ways that sound, music, and listening have been reconfigured in the postapartheid period and I illustrate the contested, or even aporetic, role of audition in the post–1994 democratic dispensation. Going against the grain of contemporary theorizations of nationhood and nationalism, I show that in contemporary South Africa the nation is made possible only by neutralizing sensory perception and thus, in a sense, becoming inaudible. Music and sound do not therefore represent South Africa but rather, paradoxically, incessantly affirm that South Africa cannot be represented.