This chapter explores the rise of a youth cultural form widely known as ‘Y Culture’. Y Culture, also known as loxion kulcha for reasons I explain below, is an emergent youth culture in Johannesburg which moves across various media forms. It articulates the clear remaking of the black body; its repositioning by the first post-apartheid generation. More specifically, it signals the supersession of an earlier era's resistance politics by an alternative politics of style and accessorisation, while simultaneously gesturing, in various ways, toward the past. It is a culture of the hip bucolic which works across a series of surfaces, requiring what Paul Gilroy (2000) calls ‘technological analogies’, in order to produce enigmatic and divergent styles of self-making.

While it draws on black American style formations it is an explicitly local reworking of the American sign – a reworking that simultaneously results in and underscores significant fractures in Gilroy's paradigm of the Black Atlantic. The conception of the body as a work of art, an investment in the body's special presence and powers, a foregrounding of the capacity for sensation, marks Y culture. Selfhood and subjectivity are presented less as inscriptions of broader institutional and political forces than as an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process.

The chapter draws on a notion of self-styling, or self-stylisation, a concept invoked by Foucault (1987) to describe those practices in which individuals ‘create a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and ways of being so as to transform themselves’ (p 225). Foucault wanted to explore how such ‘technologies of the self ‘ negotiated the transition between the moment of political liberation and ‘practices of freedom’. His notion of self-styling bears on the forms of emerging selfhood and bodily life I discuss below, though in ways that Foucault himself certainly did not have in mind. The chapter shows, too, that in attempting to understand Y cultural forms, cultural analysis which relies on ideas of translation or translatability is useful only up to a point, and that what is required is an understanding of how cultural forms move.