What is in a Song? Performing Subjectivity and Performaing the Nation in a South African Township

Abstract

This paper discusses the lyrics of selected topical songs as both a source of valuable information about my township interlocutor, whose musical acitivites I ethnographically studied for several years, and a window to a black male individual's post-apartheid subjectivity understood, in the sense of Ortner (2006), as socially and culturally constructed.

Keywords

• topical songs
• individual musician
• black male
• South Africa
• post-apartheid
• subjectivity