Parading Respectability

Parading respectability: The cultural and moral aesthetics of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape,
South Africa is an intimate and incisive portrait of the Christmas
Bands Movement in the Western Cape of South Africa. Drawing on her own
on background as well as her extended research study period during which
she became a band member and was closely involved in its day-to-day
affairs, the author, Dr Sylvia Bruinders, documents this centuries-old
expressive practice of ushering in the joy of Christmas through music by
way of a social history of the coloured communities. In doing so, she
traces the slave origins of the Christmas Bands Movement, as well as how
the oppressive and segregationist injustices of both colonialism and
apartheid, together with the civil liberties afforded in the South
African Constitution (1996) after the country became a democracy in 1994
have shaped the movement.