ABSTRACT

Th is chapter explores the rise of a youth cultural form widely known as “Y Culture.” Y Culture, also known as Loxion Kulcha for reasons I explain below, is an emergent youth culture in Johannesburg which moves across various media forms. It articulates the clear remaking of the black body, its repositioning by the fi rst postapartheid generation. More specifi cally, it signals the supercession of an earlier era’s resistance politics by an alternative politics of style and accessorization, while simultaneously gesturing, in various ways, toward the past. It is a culture of the hip bucolic which works across a series of surfaces, requiring what Paul Gilroy (2000) calls “technological analogies,” in order to produce enigmatic and divergent styles of self-making. While drawing on black American style formations, it is an explicitly local reworking of the American sign-a reworking that simultaneously results in and underscores signifi cant fractures in Gilroy’s paradigm of the Black Atlantic.1 Th e conception of the body as a work of art, an investment in the body’s special presence and powers, a foregrounding of the capacity for sensation, marks Y Culture. Selfh ood and subjectivity are presented less as inscriptions of broader institutional and political forces than as an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable artful process.