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PERFORMING BLACKNESS IN A SOUTH AFRICAN HIV/AIDS CHOIR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2011

Austin C. Okigbo
Austin C. Okigbo*
Affiliation:
Departments of Music and Africana Studies, University of Notre Dame
*
Austin C. Okigbo, Departments of Music and Africana Studies, The College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556. E-mail: aokigbo@nd.edu
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Abstract

The Siphithemba Choir, an HIV/AIDS support group at the McCord Mission Hospital in Durban, South Africa, uses songs that conflate “Africa” and “Black Race” (abantu abamnyama) or “Black Nation” (Umnyama yezwe) to perform their experience of HIV/AIDS, thus signaling global ethnic/racial consciousness in the context of the HIV/AIDS discourse. This paper argues that the musical referencing of race and ethnicity by this group of HIV-positive South Africans could be explained as a function of related factors: the nature of the AIDS virus, the history and lingering effects of apartheid, the continuing interracial acrimony in the post-apartheid environment, and the global politics of AIDS. A combination of these factors has inevitably impacted how HIV/AIDS is perceived and interpreted through the lens of race. Hence the Siphithemba Choir's musical performance is analyzed in this paper as an expressive articulation of an African and Black experience of AIDS, and a performance of Black identity in the context of the global AIDS pandemic.

Keywords

HIV/AIDSRacial DisparityAfricaBlack NationAfrican IdentityBlack IdentityIdentity Performance
Type
Active Participants: Resistance to Racism
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 8 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Racial Inequality and Health , Spring 2011 , pp. 241 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2011

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