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.