Dancing in liminal space: Youth, waithood, andtransformation in the south african documentarythe african cypher (2012)

Abstract

This article explores representations of youth in The African Cypher (2012), a South Africandocumentary film that focuses on street dances practiced by youths who have grown up intownships. It proposes that The African Cypher depicts the young dancers as situated within whatAlcinda Honwana has called a state of "waithood", unable to obtain social and financialindependence due to the socio-economic constraints that have continued after the formal end ofapartheid in 1994. Simultaneously, the film's focus on individual redemption, embodied by youngBlack men, circumscribes its potential for a wider, postcolonial critique of the predicament ofdisenfranchised youth in contemporary South Africa. Street dance, in turn, is represented as aliminal space where marginalized South African youth engage in "carnivalesque" performances thattransform, subvert, and resist the experiences of spatial and social marginalization that characterizewaithood. As the article suggests, liminality and the carnivalesque are depicted in the film asdistinctively masculine experiences that preclude female perspectives to a significant extent.