Interview with Zine Magubane

(Professor Zine Magubane, Director of African Hiphop and the Principal Investigator (PI) for South Africa for the Hiphop Archive)

About Professor Zine Magubane (In Her Own Words)

I am currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Boston College. Prior to coming to Boston College I was first an Assistant and later an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. I also taught for two years at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. I  received my PhD from Harvard University and my B.A from Princeton University.

My work has dealt with two major geographic areas of the world, the United States and Southern Africa. My choice of research topics reflects a deliberate effort to make an innovative contribution in the following four sociological sub-fields: the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of culture, social stratification, and historical sociology. My purpose in choosing topics as disparate as masculinity and music and assembling data from geographical locales outside of the United States was to make a significant theoretical contribution by pursuing areas of inquiry that, although they speak to the major concerns of the discipline, have traditionally been neglected.  My primary goal has been to pursue topics that sit at the intersection of all four areas. In this way I have been able to make contribution in several different areas precisely through showing how they exist in dynamic interaction. 

Within the broader framework of the sociology of knowledge, the question of how ideology ‘works' has been the thread connecting my varied research projects. My first book, Bringing the Empire Home: Imagining Race, Gender, and Class in Britain and Colonial South Africa  (University of Chicago Press, 2004) analyzes the historical emergence of race, gender, and class both as conceptual entities and as ideological systems. The major theoretical contribution of the text lies in the way it examines how ideologies about domination, images of the dominated and the methods of domination these ideologies and images authorize cohere into cultural systems that ‘travel' across geographic space and transform over time.

Over the last decade I have published a number of articles which examined the processes of knowledge formation behind the construction of gender and racial stereotypes. I have recently become interested in the study of popular culture. In the past three years I have published articles on Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, Bono, and hip hop. Currently I am working on a book called Brand the Beloved Country: Africa in Celebrity Culture which looks at how Africa is constructed in contemporary popular culture, with a particular emphasis on "celebrity" generated philanthropy.

The work I have been engaged in over the last five decade has demonstrated to me of analyzing the ways in which the social policies that states adopt are impacted by the unacknowledged, yet highly influential, ideological systems that can have highly determinative effects on what courses of actions state elites support and what types of actions they are likely to reject. Thus far I have edited two collections of essays, which take up this general theme. The first, entitled Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies (Africa World Press 2003) includes my essay "Could the ‘Post' in Post-Apartheid be the ‘Post' in Postcolonial: Language, Ideology, and Class Struggle." The essay explores the issue of how imperatives of the global economic order have had a clear and decisive impact on how discourses like ‘freedom', ‘democracy', and ‘human-rights' are being re-articulated by the post-apartheid regime.

 My co-author Reitu Mabokela and I completed another edited volume entitled Hear Our Voices: Race, Gender and the Status of Black South African Women in the Academy (UNISA: 2004). My essay in the volume, entitled "A Pigment of the Imagination? An Historical Analysis of Race, Subjectivity, Knowledge, and the Image of the Black Intellectual in South Africa" looks at the ways in which unspoken assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of black scholars has influenced the culture of higher education and the evolution of education policy in South Africa, past and present.

In the chapter he contributed to my edited volume Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies Paul Zeleza, an African historian, argued that there is a "widespread perception among African scholars based on the continent [that] the popularity of posts in the North have served to widen the intellectual, ideological, and institutional gaps between Africanist researchers based on and outside the Continent" (2003: 27). In order to redress this potentially serious problem, I have consistently published (and reprinted) my articles in journals such as Social Dynamics, Agenda, and the South African Historical Journal (based in South Africa), Chemchemi based at Kenyatta University (Kenya), and the CODESRIA Bulletin (based in Senegal). I have also consistently published work with African presses such as the University of South Africa Press (UNISA) and Africa World Press (based in New Jersey and Eritrea). I am also on the editorial boards of a number of African Journals such as Feminist Africa (based in South Africa) and The African Review of Books (based in Senegal).  I have also consistently contributed to the newly emerging effort to develop encyclopedias and textbooks with a distinctively Africanist focus and agenda. To this end I am on the editorial boards (and have also contributed articles to) The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History and The Encyclopedia of South Africa. I also contributed an entry on "Ethnicity and Race" to the textbook Sociology: First South African Edition. The archives, people, and history of Africa have nourished my intellectual lifeblood. In adding to the store of knowledge on and about the continent, I hope to do my part to bridge the gap between Africanist researches based on and outside the Continent.