Sinatras in Blackface: Critical Nostalgia in Postapartheid Performance

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. American blackface minstrel troupes toured South Africa. Members of the interstitial racialized group labeled “Coloured” took up the figure of “the coon” and incorporated its visual, sonic, and embodied signifiers in a popular multigenerational choral and instrumental practice called Kaapse klopse (“clubs of the Cape”). In the twenty-first century, participants continue to don blackface makeup and reenact minstrelsy’s troubled sonic and embodied repertoires in “coon song” performance competitions—now almost exclusively made up of Frank Sinatra hits. Drawing on critical engagements with nostalgia as a cultural practice, cultural memory and performance, and ethnographic fieldwork with Kaapse klopse participants in Cape Town, this article explores how contemporary reenactments of Frank Sinatra hits offer participants a critical space for nostalgic reflection against normative historiographies of the apartheid past. At a moment when the hope embedded in the transition to democracy has been met with the stark socioeconomic failures of the postapartheid state, Sinatra’s mid-century music and persona signify the hope for the future embedded in a repressive past. I demonstrate that this performance-inspired reflection enables participants to bask in a nostalgia for future possibilities, express dissatisfaction with the present, and connect to a past that is off limits. In the process, participants recycle anti-Black signifiers that keep minstrelsy ever-present. This article contributes to the special issue by revealing how subjects outside the U.S. nostalgically reperform racialized American music to comment on their own histories, experiences, and hopes for the future.