The Groovology of White Affect

This chapter proposes a sweeping theorization of white affect. Taking as starting point that boeremusiek functions as Trouillot’s “savage slot” in white cultural expression, boeremusiek’s affective modalities (as set out in the preceding chapters) are shown to be indexically linked to each other and to the performance of whiteness to form a “mimetic archive” of racial embodiment available for activation in the present day. The activation of boeremusiek’s affective modalities follows a predictable quasi-liturgical pattern, centered around ideas of boeremusiek’s purported savagery and its white salvage. Drawing on literature that equates whiteness with Protestant religiosity, the repeated (modernist) redemption of boeremusiek through performance and narrativization is framed in terms of Christian soteriology—a theoretical stance borne out in an extensive analysis of soteriological anxiety at a contemporary boeremusiek festival. The book concludes with a reworking of Charles Keil’s “participatory discrepancies” for the study of affect, arguing that the “power” of boeremusiek resides in its selective and patterned unveiling of the racial desires underpinning white pleasure, and that these affective “participatory discrepancies” continue to propel white racial embodiment and prejudice.