2012/07/01 by April Sizemore‐Barber · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Music History and Culture #Race, History, and American Society #Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies #Solidarity #Gender studies #Identity (music) #White (mutation) #Embodied cognition #Politics #Craft #Sociology #Media studies #Aesthetics #Political science #Art #Visual arts #Law
paper · doi:10.1080/17533171.2012.715416
openalex publication_date 2012/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Throughout her time as a concert singer in 1960s America Miriam Makeba was promoted as the embodied voice of a sonic, imagined Africa. Where her white audiences were attracted to the complete ‘‘otherness’’ of her African blackness, her black American audiences saw themselves – or imagined versions of themselves – put on stage, and built solidarities between their own struggle and the struggle against apartheid. In this essay, I argue that the discourses that followed Makeba’s voice and body reflected the evolving attitudes of America towards Africa, and, through Africa, its contradictory relationship to its own African American citizens. Makeba played on these discourses to craft a political and musical identity in solidarity with black and diasporic causes. This identity, embodied in the persona of ‘‘Mama Africa,’’ allowed Makeba the flexibility to speak to and for her fellow (South) Africans with cultural authority. By joining the oft-opposed positions of ‘‘Africa’’ and ‘‘The World,’’ Makeba became what I’m calling an African Cosmopolitan.