Under Erasure: William Kentridge,Derrida, and Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article aims to read the work of South African artist William Kentridge through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace. Kentridge utilizes a unique style of filmic animation: charcoal pictures drawn on a single piece of paper, where the animation is achieved by erasing and re-drawing parts of the picture, and then filming the image again. I will argue that this technique, as well as Kentridge’s focus on deferral, memory, and identity, share an affinity with the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, and political aspects of Derrida’s trace. Drawing attention to the trace—a paradox of presence, where motion is achieved precisely by the deferred nonpresence in each drawing—Kentridge acknowledges, in a similar way to Derrida, the impossibility of ontological thought and knowing. In post-apartheid South Africa, this is not only an aesthetic statement but a political one as well. By maintaining the traces, Kentridge concedes that knowing should be deferred, acknowledging that what we know about the other is limited, if not impossible, and that the apartheid regime’s attempt to master the other was violent and erroneous.     

South Africa’s settler-colonial present: Khoisan revivalism and the question of indigeneity

ABSTRACT

South Africa’s settler-colonial past is widely acknowledged. And yet, commonplace understandings of the post-apartheid era and a focus on the end of segregation make an appraisal of settler colonialism in present-day South Africa difficult and controversial. Nonetheless, we argue that an understanding of South Africa’s “settler-colonial present” is urgent and needed. We suggest that settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination survives apartheid. In particular, we focus on the recent revival and political mobilisation of indigenous Khoisan identity and cultural heritage to show that settler colonialism and apartheid should be understood as distinct yet overlapping modes of domination. A settler-colonial mode of governance aiming at “the elimination of the native” in two interrelated domains, dispossession and transfer, characterises past and present South Africa. An understanding of this continuity offers opportunities for an original interpretation of both Khoisan revivalism and contemporary South African society.     

CRIME,ART AND PUBLIC CULTURE

Jane Alexander's ‘Security’ was installed at the 2009 Joburg Art Fair as a Special Project. This essay investigates notions of being guarded and fenced-in, which are implicit in this piece, in an attempt to breathe new life into a space that has all too easily been blanketed as a new form of ‘apartheid’ in contemporary South Africa. Rather, I suggest, what ‘Security’ allowed its publics to experience was a complex process of working through the everyday ingredients of the post-apartheid, and so to realize new connections between strangers. I argue that this work, at this time, probes at the nexus of a private–public sphere that allows for a real-time grappling with issues of a private nature in the public. The essay further positions this work in relation to some others by Alexander in an attempt to more fully grasp what ‘Security’ says about the present moment. Finally, the Joburg Art Fair is investigated as a setting richly suggestive of this moment in South Africa that simultaneously projects, and allows for, ambivalence in its art publics.     

Ethical injunctions: the University of the Western Cape in the face of the ‘here and now’

This essay poses the question of the ethical in relation to the work of memorialising the University of the Western Cape (UWC) after apartheid. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s statement on the ethical in The Logic of Sense and reading its implications through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and Jeremy Cronin’s ‘Even the Dead’, I argue that the ethical entails becoming adequate to the fracturing of event, leading to an understanding of the subject effect prior to its stamping by race, gender and identity. The ethical, in this formulation, reckons with the materiality of the past as its weight orders the present. It is this possibility of becoming adequate, of ‘not being unworthy of what happens to us’, which is offered in Ingrid Masondo’s photo-essay on UWC. I read Masondo as offering an encounter with images of the Leibnizian world as they appear at UWC, an encounter that registers alternate trajectories as they are expressed in ‘point of view’. Becoming adequate, here, involves registering the role of UWC (both conscious and unconscious) in the subjectification of persons during and after apartheid. This essay punctuates the rhythm of the memorialisation of UWC, by asking that this weight of the past be reckoned with while articulating alternate trajectories for both the university (and particularly the disciplines of the humanities) and for the understandings of subjectivity that attend to it, a demand that cannot be settled cheaply.     

A post-apartheid paradigm? a view from the outside

The South African student movements of 2015 and 2016 have critically recalled the question: how to dismantle the thinking inherited from apartheid? More than twenty years after the fall of the racist regime, this question still haunt South African humanities. While the term “post-apartheid” might have addressed this urgency and even crystallized an intellectual ambition, it’s multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings have made it hard to establish a paradigm. The authors of this special section have sought to interrogate the use and abuse of the concept in the literature of their respective disciplines, keeping in mind that, whatever its polysemy, the term has become a reference point for the humanities worldwide, as untranslatable as it is inescapable.     

New dawn or end of labour?: from South Africa’s East Rand to Ekurhuleni

ABSTRACT

The question raised in this article is whether the key role played under apartheid by labour in the transition to democracy can be revived in the struggle against the persistent and deepening inequality of the post-apartheid period. We argue that the transition to a neoliberal state in the post-apartheid period has fragmented workers and weakened their capacity to build sustainable workplace organization. However, in spite of this, we identify the emergence of collective action and organization amongst these precarious workers. We show how in response to the degeneration of their traditional organizations, these workers are rebuilding worker organization still very much inscribed in the organizational traditions built on the East Rand over 40 years ago. We challenge the pessimistic ‘end of labour’ thesis that suggests that the informalization of employment has made collective organization impossible.     

Memento Mori: The Book as a Cut

Despite Testo Junkie’s overt criticisms of psychoanalysis, this essay attempts to read the formal aspect of the work—as a process of mourning, a body-essay, an experimental protocol of intoxication—through the lens of the everyday practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Looking at the way soma erupts in the consulting room, the conundrums of agency and identity, Preciado’s (2013) work on the biopolitics of the psychopharamacopornographic era is shown to be critical to any unraveling of a symptom. On a more personal scale, Preciado’s own stated intention that the writing of the book should function as a cut, as a Memento Mori, is read in this essay as a depiction of the extreme limits one must traverse to locate an experience of desire, beneath or beyond the apparatuses of the state—something that Preciado shows as penetrating further into our lives and bodies than many of us are prepared to acknowledge.     

The aftermath of oppression: in search of resolution through family photographs of the forcibly removed of District Six,Cape Town

Reflecting on a body of family photographs from forcibly removed ex-residents of Roger Street, District Six, Cape Town, I shift frames, from aesthetics to restorative justice, to open a set of questions around trauma, memory and freedom in the aftermath of oppression. Intimate documents of family life, the photographs speak of the destruction of community and of the multiple valencies of place and home. They also speak of historical catastrophe and of the unfinished business of apartheid. Approaching the notion of archive as being open-ended, and not bound in time and space, I suggest a principled and forceful space for engaging a set of debates that lie at the centre of post-apartheid society, even as they are generally disavowed.     

Spectres of Afrikanerdom in contemporary commodity culture: history,memory, and imagining the self

The centrality of nostalgia in contemporary Afrikaner culture is contingent on the gradual demotion of Afrikaner history in post-apartheid South Africa. This article, however, departs from the view that such recapitulations of the past are necessarily always intransigent. Casting Afrikaner nostalgia as manifesting dissatisfaction with the government is ultimately not representative of the diverse spectres of Afrikanerdom that haunt selected commodity items, such as the t-shirts discussed in this article. If we allow for a melange of narratives and interpretations to emerge, as a postmodern view of history would encourage, it enables us to challenge a one-dimensional view of Afrikaner nostalgia. This article therefore posits that specific nostalgic imaginings of Afrikanerdom are decidedly self-reflexive and progressive. Instead of attempting to reify the past (together with irrecoverable positions of power), some of the discourses addressed in this article reveal Afrikanerdom’s capacities for appropriation, aestheticisation and commodification, which open up new possibilities for thinking about Afrikaner subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Examining the undisclosed margins: postcolonial intellectuals and subaltern voices

South African history and culture is etched with traces of subalterns that continue to struggle against silencing. The resistance struggle owed much to the efforts of ordinary South Africans, who bore the brunt of repression. The tactics of the apartheid government included structural repression, state violence and cultural suppression. To the extent that resistance was outlawed and severely punished, the struggle was a subaltern expression. Less well known is the fact that there were other sources of cultural repression: some disaffected beneficiaries of apartheid, who styled themselves as liberal intellectuals were quite reactionary in their responses to the resistance literature. Some relatively progressive intellectuals have also contributed (however unwittingly) to the marginalization of black writers, men and women. The women’s resistance poetry addresses political and gender activism, responses to the deaths in the struggle, the recognition of the need for imaginative strategies to prevail against apartheid, capitalism, patriarchy and neo-colonialism, as well as the need for self-reflection and self-criticism. The post-apartheid period has brought new and tougher challenges. The testimony given by women at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests how women have been silenced by tradition, the brutality of the state and some of their comrades, fear of the consequences of being heard, and by the inherent shortcomings in the structure and process of the investigation. The condition of migrant subalterns in the post-apartheid state is investigated by examining the lives of women who have casual employment as domestic workers and live in makeshift housing in urban shack settlements. Most are sole supporters and caretakers of their households and struggle to make up the curbs in social services that have resulted from structural adjustment. Poorly paid and exploited by their employers, abandoned by the trade union movement and ignored by the local government, the fact that they and their dependents survive is a function of their capacity for labour, networking and creativity. From the methods and achievements of subaltern organizations, it appears that they have a pivotal role to play in improving the lives of subalterns.     

Transforming the Springboks: Re-imagining the South African Nation through Sport

Abstract

Nation-building occurs not only through the creation of formal institutions, but also through struggles in cultural and symbolic contexts. In apartheid South Africa, the rugby union Springboks both symbolised and institutionalised a racially based form of ‘bounded citizenship’. In post-apartheid South Africa, the Springboks have emerged as a contested and significant site in the attempt to build a non-racial nation through reconciliation. To explore these contests, we undertook a qualitative thematic analysis of newspaper discourses around the Springboks, reconciliation and nation-building in the contexts of the 1995 and 1999 Rugby World Cups. Our research suggests, first, that the Springboks have been re-imagined in newspaper discourses as a symbol of the non-racial nation-building process in South Africa, especially in ‘media events’ such as the World Cup. Second, we find that there are significant limitations in translating this symbolism into institutionalised practice, as exemplified by newspaper debates over the place of ‘merit’ in international team selection processes. We conclude that the media framing of the role of the Springboks in nation-building indicates that unless the re-imagination of the Springboks is accompanied by a transformation in who is selected to represent the team, and symbolically the nation, the Springboks' contribution to South African nation-building will be over.     

Duration,Skin, and the Ageing Subject

I read Lynne Segal’s book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (2013) as a radical account of subjectivity in which, drawing on Freud, she proposes that what is lost, and therefore constitutive of the subject of old age, is time itself. This temporalization of subjectivity allows us to see more clearly the relation between time and materiality and more specifically between time, subject, and skin. I respond to Segal’s powerful work with some comments on Henri Bergson and Didier Anzieu.     

Selling sorrow: testimony,representation and images of HIV‐positive South African women

In post‐apartheid South Africa, testimony and personal narrative have opened a space for marginalised voices to emerge. At the same time, to testify is to occupy a position of vulnerability. This paper focuses on a series of self‐portraits by black HIV‐positive women and points to how their entry into the public sphere and the global art market has been conditioned by their social and economic marginality. These portraits have been read as ‘maps’, providing access to the truth of the subjects they represent. Such readings perpetuate rather than challenge the myth of the transparent, authentic African subject.     

Things Temporal Exposé, Passages from Benjamin

Nineteenth-century Paris was for Walter Benjamin the site of a singular historical event, the ur-form of bourgeois modernity. It was a “hellish” time disastrously bent on repeating itself and yet a threshold of great promise and possibility. By focusing on Benjamin's 1935 and 1939 Exposés for The Arcades Project, my paper develops the keywords of the Exposés (Arcades, Fashion, etc.), and elaborates ways in which these objects articulate such different temporal possibilities. For example, “fashion” enacts an eternally recurrent and capital time, whereas “arcades” represent wish images of the past that might be actualized into utopian promises of the future. My argument develops Benjamin's “objective” framing of temporality. In the Exposés specific and phenomenal things communicate temporalities specific to modernity. Objects not only communicate time but also enable the temporal experience of the modern subject. This reading challenges idealist interpretations of temporality grounded within an interiorizing subject. I do not argue that Benjamin privileges an objective temporal horizon “over” the subject but rather that he resituates dialectical possibilities of temporality in the engagement between subjects and commonplace objects.     

Temporalities of Victimhood: Time in the Study of Postconflict Societies

Researchers in peace and conflict studies have rarely explicitly engaged with time and temporality. This article develops a temporal analysis of victimhood in a mature posttransition society, drawing on qualitative research with victims/survivors of gross human rights violations in South Africa. Two decades after the democratic transition, there is a prevalent understanding that it is finally time for victims to “move on.” In contrast to the supposed linear temporality of peace processes, however, the consequences of past violence continue to impact on interviewees’ lives and are exacerbated by contemporary experiences of victimization. I identify several areas of temporal conflicts that characterize postconflict societies: victimhood as temporary/victimhood as continuous; the pace of national reconciliation/the time(s) of individual healing; and the speed of a neoliberal economy/the pace of social transformation. I examine temporal hierarchies that reflect broader socioeconomic marginalization, such as being made to wait for compensation and social pressures of overcoming the past. This temporal analysis of victimhood thus not only highlights the mismatch between victims’ needs and political and cultural expectations of closure, but it also draws attention to the temporality of transitional processes and programs at different social and institutional levels.     

Arenas of contested citizenship: housing policy in South Africa

There are well-founded concerns that current South African housing policy will entrench and reinforce rather than reduce existing inequalities that are the legacy of apartheid. This study examines the processes by which attempts to formulate housing policy that would have moved the country towards egalitarian citizenship were undermined and scuttled largely through inappropriate timing of policy negotiations and shrewed manipulation of the process by forces opposed to change. The housing policy analysis is centered on the core themes of citizenship, property, and place which are pivotal to the process of post-apartheid healing and reconciliation. An introduction to these concepts in the context of housing policy in apartheid South Africa sets the background against which the proceedings of the National Housing Forum, the vehicle for policy negotiation and formulation established during the dying years of apartheid, are examined. The policy that emerged and was adopted by the post-apartheid government are then evaluated within the framework of the core themes of the study. The analysis is structured around the major place types that are the legacy of apartheied: the African “location” or township, the displaced urban settlements or dormitory towns of the African reserves, and the rural homestead. Within this structure, the form of citizenship of the inhabitants of each place type, namely, township residents, migrant workers, long distance commuters, and rural women is considered. The analysis reveals that realizing the goals of equal citizenship is contingent upon policy that will move beyond the confines of the current uniform and monetarist approach, and address the broader issues of property and place.     

Tagging the spectral mobility of the stateless body: Deleuze,stasis, and graffiti

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.