The dual terms of Composing Apartheid combine in a double act: primarily, the book explores facets of the musical make-up of apartheid, but simultaneously, and more broadly, it reveals how, through this cultural composition, apartheid itself was variously made. But what is ‘apartheid itself’? It was – is – a horror, notorious the world over; to the extent, as Jacques Derrida pointed out, that the word has never been translated, ‘as if all the languages of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word’ (1986a: 331). The word, importantly as Derrida emphasises, references a concept and reality (1986b: 362); or, in the case of apartheid: words, concepts and realities – plural. The relations among these are always complex, seldom stable. And so, while it would be irresponsible scholarship not to resolutely historicise apartheid – officially a period of South African history from 1948 to 1994 – we can only do so ‘thickly’ by looking beyond apartheid's geographic and temporal borders. Thus, as some of the concepts of apartheid preceded its naming, so some of its realities persist after its dethroning; and vice versa. Composing Apartheid endeavours to trace the relationships between some of the names, concepts and realities as they variously interacted, and continue to interact, on the musical landscape, and it does so as historically and socially responsible scholarship: genealogising our musical histories, as Michel Foucault would say, in the name of a critical ‘history of the present’.

What a collection like this cannot do, and this Introduction does not attempt, is to map out the totality of that history. Rather, I want to explore just some of the topography of apartheid's musical landscape as revealed by the essays collected here. I do so by proceeding from the logic of apartheid, named in the word, which Derrida highlighted with typical deconstructionist flair: