| Sumario: | This article explores representations of youth in The African Cypher (2012), a South African documentary film that focuses on street dances practiced by youths who have grown up in townships. It proposes that The African Cypher depicts the young dancers as situated within what Alcinda Honwana has called a state of “waithood”, unable to obtain social and financial independence due to the socio-economic constraints that have continued after the formal end of apartheid in 1994. Simultaneously, the film’s focus on individual redemption, embodied by young Black men, circumscribes its potential for a wider, postcolonial critique of the predicament of disenfranchised youth in contemporary South Africa. Street dance, in turn, is represented as a liminal space where marginalized South African youth engage in “carnivalesque” performances that transform, subvert, and resist the experiences of spatial and social marginalization that characterize waithood. As the article suggests, liminality and the carnivalesque are depicted in the film as distinctively masculine experiences that preclude female perspectives to a significant extent
|
|---|