UC San Diego

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

“Be(Long)ing: New Africanism & South African Cultural Producers Confronting State Repression in an Era of Exile”

by

Martin Luther Boston

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

University of California San Diego, 2019

Professor Dayo F. Gore, Chair

My interdisciplinary research brings together cultural, diasporic and socio-political perspectives to present a socio-historical study of South African cultural producers working in an era of exile across the globe (roughly 1959 – the mid 1980s). “Be(Long)ing: New Africanism & South African Cultural Producers Confronting State Repression in an Era of Exile,” seeks to understand exile as a function of government control, as a way to theorize global anti-Blackness and modes of Black solidarity, and as an avenue through which South African cultural producers and artistic works became active in the politics of various countries around the world. Chiefly, I argue that the South African settler colonial state created the conditions for its own demise and one significant way it did this was by creating a stateless Black subject that relied on cultural expression, an exilic consciousness, and Pan-African solidarities and community making processes to topple this regime. Native Black South Africans used their cultural specificity and traditions as well as their long history of translocal and transnational cultural development to create and theorize the communities and tools necessary to be triumphant in this fight.

This dissertation consists of four body chapters, in which each explores a different set of objects that studies Black South African exiles and their collective cultural works. Ultimately, this project gives insight into how the condition of exile, its connections to Pan-Africanism and cultural exile’s struggles against anti-Blackness produced new forms of Black subjectivity in response to heightened state repression.

The first chapter, “Belonging Nowhere,” looks at two pivotal events that led to the era of exile in South Africa: the rise and fall of the township Sophiatown and its renaissance, and the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Chapter 2, “Prelude to Departure,” situates the 1959 jazz opera King Kong and the film Come Back, Africa as key productions that critiqued the apartheid state. These productions would also—due to an (im)perfect storm of events taking place almost simultaneously, including Sharpeville, the 1960 Venice Film Festival and a European run of King Kong—eventually lead to exile for some of the most prominent and infamous South African cultural producers in the country’s history. Chapters 3 and 4, “Armed Propaganda” and “Citizens of Africa,” respectively, look at what South African cultural producers were creating, how they lived, and the politics they took up while in exile. Chapter 3 focuses on the exiled African National Congress (ANC) radio program, “Radio Freedom” and its Women’s Section radio segment, “Dawn Breaks,” and Chapter 4 considers the lived experiences of exiled South African cultural producers, with particular interest paid to international superstar singer, Miriam Makeba, and writer and musician, Todd Matshikiza.