Stars in the Southern Hemisphere: Celebrity, Agency, and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle
Public lecture with Professor Louise Betlehem. The lecture is a part of the international conference on Celebrity and Protest in Africa and in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle at the University of Copenhagen.
One of the overarching aims of this conference is to problematize the neoliberal narrative of celebrity focused on the achievements of singular individuals in metropolitan settings. In line with this, this lecture links the celebrity activism of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela during their period of exile in continental Africa to larger networks informed by solidaristic visions and collective agency rooted in pan-Africanism or state nationalisms.
Recent research focused on the construction of Makeba’s celebrity in the United States, subsumes a rise-and-fall dynamic that does not see past her relocation to Guinea following the notoriety she endured in mainstream public culture in the wake of her marriage to radical black activist, Stokely Carmichael. The neglect of Africa as an arena of agency can arguably be extrapolated to include Masekela, Makeba’s former
husband.
Through examining Makeba’s and Masekela’s different embeddedness in intra-continental circuits of performance across time, in such music festivals as “Zaire ’74” – intended to coincide with the media spectacle of the “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman – and the much later Graceland tour with Paul Simon, this intervention seeks to reappraise the nature of their agency. It turns the gaze to Africa to broaden our understanding of celebrity and protest in a continental frame.
Louise Bethlehem is a literary scholar and cultural theorist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book, Skin Tight : Apartheid Literary Culture and i'ts Aftermath (Unisa Press, Brill 2006, translated into Hebrew, Resling 2011) investigates the role of literature in contexts of severe political oppression and resistance. She has co-edited seven volumes in the fields of South African literature, African Studies and Cultural Studies. The most recent of these, Cultural Solidarities: Apartheid and the Anti-Colonial Commons of World Literature, coedited with Stefan Helgesson and Gül Bilge Han is available for free download from Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies until December 2018.