Ethnic Politics and Aesthetic Criticism: An Analysis of Social Media Discourses About Skhosana Buhlungu’s Music

Abstract

Drawing on theorisations of popular culture as a site of cultural hegemony and Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, this paper is an analysis of social media discourses about Skhosana Buhlungu’s song Dlala ntethe. Our main thesis is that the song became the locus of expression and contestations about ethnic identity. We demonstrate how the song, like all forms of popular culture, became implicated in the ideological battle for cultural hegemony in a highly ethnicised Zimbabwean society. The paper is based on purposively sampled Facebook and Twitter posts gathered via manual web crawling using the hashtags #Dlala ntethe and #Ntethe. A thematic analysis of the data reveals that aesthetic endorsement of the song became a marker of ethnicity. Findings demonstrate that taste for Dlala ntethe was subordinated to the logic of an essentialist Ndebele ethnic solidarity. Additionally, it emerged from the analysis that when it was expedient to do so, Ndebele identity was framed as a fluid cultural construct that is conferred or revoked depending on one’s disposition towards Dlala ntethe. Relatedly, debates about the aesthetic quality of Skhosana’s music reveal an ethnic double standard where similar musical offerings by Shona and South African musicians are not subjected to the same standard.

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