Between Tinseltown and Sophiatown: The Double Temporality of Popular Culture in the Autobiographical Cultural Memory of Bloke Modisane and Miriam Makeba

Abstract

Prompted by Paul Gilroy's question as to how active remembrance in black expressive culture is associated with a distinctive and disjunctive temporality (1993: 212), this article brings to view divided autobiographical subjectivities through the problematic, if double, temporality of Bloke Modisane's Blame Me on History (1963) and Miriam Makeba's Makeba: My Story (1988) such as they are framed between popular culture and figures of memory that straddle Tinseltown and Sophiatown. It does so by referring to these two prominent Sophiatown figures' preoccupation with voyaging -discursively through figures of memory and biogeographically -in performative Hollywood en route to exile in the geopolitical West. The two auto­biographical texts that record each moment of the memoric and material journeys -entries and exits -effectively bear witness to rhizomatic alliances that are fore­grounded by Hollywood-mediated agential discourses of performativity. The paper concludes that the signifying time of Modisane's and Makeba's self-representation is doubled by temporal and spatial deixes of both Tinseltown and Sophiatown in general and the margins of reconstructive memory and spectatorship of cinematic popular culture in particular.

Opsomming

Aangespoor deur Paul Gilroy (1993: 212) se vraag hoe aktiewe herinnering in swart ekspressiewe kultuur met 'n kenmerkende en ontwrigtende temporaliteit verband hou, lig hierdie artikel verdeelde outobiografiese subjektiwiteite uit deur middel van die problematiese dog tweeledige temporaliteit van Bloke Modisane se Blame Me on History (1963) en Miriam Makeba se Makeba: My Story (1988) soos dit saamgevoeg word tussen populere kultuur en figure wat voortleef in die herinnering aan sowel Hollywood as Sophiatown. Daar word gekyk na hierdie twee vooraanstaande Sophiatown-figure se preokkupasie met reise -diskursief deur figure uit die geheue, en bodiografies deur middel van optredes in Hollywood en route na ballingskap in die geopolitiese Weste. Die twee outobiografiese tekste bevat 'n beskrywing van elke moment van die fisiese reise asook die herinneringe - toetredes en uittredes - en getuig op doeltreffende wyse van risomatiese alliansies wat deur middel van die vertoningsdiskoerse van Hollywood op die voorgrond gebring word. Die artikel kom tot die gevolgtrekking dat die aanduidende tyd van Modisane en Makeba se selfverteenwoordiging verdubbel word deur die temporele en ruimtelike gebruik van deiktiese verwysings na beide Hollywood en Sophiatown in die algemeen en die marges van rekonstruktiewe geheue en toeskouerskap van kinematiese populere kultuur in die besonder.