Writing against exile : a chronotopic reading of the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba, Joe Mogotsi, and Hugh Masekela.
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Date
2006
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Abstract
This dissertation analyses the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba, Joe Mogotsi and
Hugh Masekela. The story of these formerly exiled musicians' lives as musicians who
embodied the urbanising and eclectic black musical ethos of the 1950s onward has
been integral to the music historiography on this era. The exilic trajectory of their
story also has political resonance, as it parallels the shifts in structures of power
characteristic of apartheid South Africa. Popular discourses that construct and narrate
an incrementally conscientizing South African populist culture through this period
have therefore also represented the musicians, through written and visual material,
with this political resonance in mind.
The musicians' autobiographies, however, articulate discourses of the nation from
positions other these. These other positions are interanimated by literary, musical and
socio-political discourses that already pervade the South African historical sphere.
This informs the dialogic interplay of time, space and character in their texts, which I
examine using the literary figure of the chronotope as a perceptual tool for their
reading. Through analysis, I unpack how time becomes symbolically charged and
space becomes mythologized in the autobiographies, how departure and eventual exile
are narrated, and how the subsequent chronotopic rupture created by exile affects
narration of home. Reading the struggle for authorship and authority evident in the
texts' vacillation between biographical and autobiographical 'truth', the possible
significances towards which this struggle points for a (re ) interpretation of South
Africa's (hi)story of exile permeates the subject and process of this research.
Description
Thesis (M.Mus.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.
Keywords
Makeba, Miriam., Mogotsi, Joe, 1924-, Masekela, Hugh, 1939-, Theses--Music.