Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. Veit Erlmann. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 312 pp. Cloth $65.00.

In this dense volume, Veit Erlmann focuses on the musical tour as a site that gives expression to "the interdependence of Western constructions of Africa and of African representations of the West" (p. 214). The core of this book is devoted to the African Choir's tour of the United States and the Zulu Choir's tour of London in the 1890s, and Paul Simon's Graceland tour of South Africa in the 1980s.

Loren Kruger (1999) makes a similar argument about African claims to modern subjectivity within colonial constructs in her analysis of "tribal sketches" and historical pageants in early 20th century South Africa. The weight of Erlmann's argument, however, resides at the level of "the individual" or the "bourgeois subject" (p. 36) as a site for the construction of a range of personal and social identities as a mode of "self-fashioning" in the face of societal, national and global pressures.

Erlmann's analysis also departs from the industrial, economic, and other invisible and disembodied global processes that produce various racially or nationally encoded musics under the neutralizing term of "hybrid." Rather, the author mobilizes a Victorian-inspired notion of the physical traveler as a remedy for a set of ontological and epistemological crises produced by the onset of modernity. These examples of musicians traveling between South Africa and the West at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries are not only motivated by, and generative of, fictions about the Other, but reveal specific longings and biographical fictions of self. Suspending a concern for post-colonial relations of power, Erlmann works with a more closely postmodern idea of a "global imagination." The global imagination evokes a world made from images that are inscribed, projected, worn, mimicked and contradicted in a mutual economy of cultural imagining.

The book opens in the 19th century where the totalizing epistemology of spectacle produced such forms as the panorama, world fairs, Parisian shopping arcades and the panopticon to which the author adds the scopic orientation of 19th century autobiography and travel writing. In his analysis of autobiographical texts of the African choir members published in the London papers, Erlmann argues that these writings manifest mutually produced and intertwined fictions of the self as articulated through an association with African nationhood as much as through an association with Victorian values of education, Christianity, heroism.

Erlmann claims that late-19th- and late-20th-century worldviews reach across the hundred-year gap that separates them by virtue of their common embeddedness in "societies of the spectacle" (p. 5). In so doing he intends to disrupt disciplinary boundaries that consider culture as situated in time and place and to "offer a picture of cultures in constant state of movement and displacement" (p. 8).

Another unifying theme is his extension of Benedict Anderson's (1983) conceptualization of the nation as an "imagined community" by recognizing nationalistic trajectories inscribed in religious narratives of redemption and education. The first half of the book historically grounds this phenomenon in the history of the missions and black independent churches in South Africa, and the civilizing values in Victorian Christianity perceived by both blacks and whites as embodied in the hymn, and in American Negro spirituals. In the second half of the book this theme of redemption plays out as a means of locating personal development within a global sense of historical change, rather than in a societal search for epistemological truths.

For example, Erlmann analyzes Paul Simon's motives in the Graceland tour as exemplifying Simon's "own search for identity," which is "emblematic of the attempts of significant sectors of the middle class to refashion themselves as cultural intermediaries to reach some state of grace and redemption" (p. 181). Ladysmith Black Mambazo's songs mirror this gesture with their own longing for "home" as a locus of identity, "redemption," and wholeness" (p. 200), provoked by and made possible through an engagement with "the modern world" (p. 200).

Nowhere is the complex relationship between national identity, biography, and religious redemption more apparent than in Chapter 13, which addresses another Ladysmith Black Mambazo collaboration, this time with South African born Tug Yourgrau in "The Song of Jacob Zulu." Here the dramatized biography of Andrew Zondo becomes a site for the autobiographical projections of the collaborators. These projections are infused with tropes of nostalgia, innocence, and ritual religious conversion that simultaneously symbolize personal and national redemption. Despite this potentially interesting layering of biographies, this chapter diverts and disappoints by invoking the over-determining discourse of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as emblematic of South Africa's forging of a post-apartheid national identity. Consequently, Erlmann leaves terms such as "politics of memory" (p. 235), "reconciliation" (p. 244), and "postapartheid identity" (p. 235) undeconstructed and unaffected by the mill of global and mediated distortions as if to signify some axiomatic irreducible essential of present-day South Africa. One finds evidence for this in Erlmann's reading of the sequel, Nomathemba, a story of a woman who leaves her rural home and wifely duties to make an independent life for herself in the city. Falling short of his earlier imperative that aesthetic expression be considered as a "medium for the construction of meanings" rather than an "agent" of a fixed relationship between signifier and signified (p. 187), Erlmann reads Nomathemba simply as a "metaphor for the people of 'New South Africa's' continued search for hope and renewal in their country" [my emphasis] (p. 244).

Although Erlmann does draw parallels between 20th century film and cyberspace and 19th century panorama (p. 5, 176) as mediums by which societies are governed by images (p. 176), the author never does address music performed in any of these mediums directly. He excuses himself by contrasting his arguments on global culture with Appadurai's, which are based in the rise of electronic media (p. 177). Instead, he is more interested in Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Rorty's notion of an aesthetic community characterized by what Erlmann calls "triumph of the symbolic" (p. 177) and in the "utopian power" of Michel Maffesoli's notions of style and figure (p. 177). These ideas are taken up relatively briefly in Erlmann's last two chapters devoted to two more Ladysmith Black Mambazo collaborations with Spike Lee in Do It A Capella, and with Michael Jackson in the music video Moonwalker.

This rich, multidisciplinary work is destined to interest a broad range of scholars. Ethnomusicologists will find their home in the occasional but detailed musical analyses. Historians will find a depth of historical information. Cultural theorists will find a reliable survey as well as a significant contribution to the literature on trans-nationalism, modernization and globalization. In addition, the book's perspectives speak to the current academic discussion in South Africa on biography and autobiography as genres mediating national narratives of political transition.

Stephanie Marlin-Curiel
Department of Performance Studies
New York University

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1983.

Kruger, Loren. The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Publics Since 1910. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.