Remixing Race After Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse in South Africa

The first in-depth study of Kaapse klopse, a carnival tradition in South Africa

Remixing Race after Apartheid is the first ethnographic monograph centered on Kaapse klopse, a South African carnival tradition, and it uses this genre as a critical lens to explore how sound mediates racial identity in the postapartheid era. Drawing on immersive fieldwork, interviews, and performance analysis, the book employs methods from sensory ethnography, sound studies, and critical race theory to foreground participants' lived experiences and aesthetic practices.

The study reveals how klopse has expanded since apartheid's end, particularly among youth and women, serving as a site of cultural resistance and self-making. Participants use klopse to respond to the racial and spatial legacies of apartheid and to marginalization within the everyday social, political, and economic conditions in which they live.

Challenging the reductive portrayals of klopse as either escapist or criminal, the book critiques the use of imported aesthetic categories and instead centers local meaning-making. Remixing Race shows how klopse operates as a dynamic, multisensory space where performers negotiate identity, history, and belonging--without collapsing their creativity into identity politics or erasing their social positioning. It offers a model for how ethnographic and sonic methodologies can illuminate the affective and political dimensions of racialized cultural expression.