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Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), ISBN 978-0-226-36240-3 (hb), ISBN 978-0-226-36254-0 (pb).

Kwaito promises a sensory world unburdened by the struggles of the present; kwaito promises freedom by imagining what it would feel like to be free. Gavin Steingo argues that kwaito, a style of electronic dance music in South Africa that emerged out of contact with ‘house music’ from beyond its borders, creates an alternate reality through sound. This alternate reality may be illusory – that is, creative and counterfactual – but it is nonetheless necessary for any hope of social, cultural, or political transformation. In this sense, one might argue that kwaito’s politics are aspirational and utopian, based on imagination and affirmation rather than disenchantment and negation. In Kwaito’s Promise, Steingo invites readers to reconsider how politics and aesthetics intertwine in musical life, arguing against the dismissal of aesthetics as merely an ideological obfuscation of power. The problem that animates this book is a problem that should not be a problem: since its emergence, kwaito has been attacked by South African politicians and cultural commentators as an irresponsibly apolitical distraction from the struggles of the postapartheid era. Although the style first coalesced as a musical scene and style under the institutionalized racial segregation (i.e. apartheid) of the 1980s, after its abolition kwaito took prominence as an emblematic sounding of freedom. Euphoric and celebratory, kwaito indexed a moment when non-white South Africans could enjoy imagining a life not defined by oppression, immobility, and isolation. The hope and optimism that prevailed during the transition from white supremacist majority rule to multiracial universal suffrage was gradually replaced by frustration and stasis, as apartheid-era atrocities went unpunished, wealth remained concentrated in white hands, and the new political regime proved to be no less susceptible to corruption. As Steingo writes, ‘Dealing with freedom is hard: if music during apartheid expressed the struggle for freedom, then kwaito expresses the struggle of freedom’ (2). Kwaito’s Promise is thus devoted to examining the various ways that kwaito articulates this struggle of freedom, responding to contemporary critiques that fault its apparent lack of engagement with ‘real-life’ struggles. Although Steingo does not make the resonances explicit, this book’s argument fits into a longer and broader genealogy of