‘Hail to the King’: Da Hip-Hop Empire and the Question of Marginalscapes in Post-1994 Neoliberal South Africa

Abstract

Zuluboy’s Hail to the King provides an instance of interpretation where the seeming imperial reach of the hip-hop musical genre can be seen as in contradictory entanglements with new-age global capitalist empire, the past British empire and the Zulu empire. By exploiting popular memory of the Zulu empire, endemic in the enduring Zulu nationalism, Zuluboy presents images of marginalscapes of abandoned black subjectivities. Through these images and the invocation of the Zulu empire, Zuluboy galvanizes marginal identities to a realization of specific concerns of post-1994 neoliberal South Africa and their larger relevance to global black politics. Drawing from the concept of ‘uncontrollable rhizomes’ (Deleuze and Guattari), and Hardt and Negri’s notion of the new-age capitalist empire, this article demonstrates that popular expression, hip hop in this case, can pose a particular challenge to global capitalist flows in ways that transcend the local, precipitating theoretical framing that should reflect anew on the global south and global north relations.

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