Apartheid's Endless Itineraries

Apartheid's Endless Itineraries Timothy Wright (bio) REMAINS OF THE SOCIAL: DESIRING POST-APARTHEID EDITED BY MAURITS VAN BEVER DONKER, ROSS TRUSCOTT, GARY MINKLEY, AND PREMESH LALU. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017 For many decades now South Africa has worn the mantle of global exemplarity. During 1980s, was, in Derrida's phrase, "racism's last word" (le dernier mot du racisme), a place where European racial thinking had reached its apogee (and, one hoped, culminating endpoint). Following collapse apartheid regime and democratic elections 1994, it became, under sign Nelson Mandela, "rainbow nation": concrete illustration quasi-miraculous overcoming oppression through empathy forgiveness beacon for other nations struggling with violent histories. In recent years, however, even as burnished image Mandela been iconized around world, Africans themselves have come to suspect, some discomfort, that their country means something else: disappointment by or betrayal political ideals. Promises made—regarding jobs, land, housing—have not kept; an endemic corruption set consolidate elite class; coarse explicit varieties racism, after strategically keeping heads down, resurfaced; found itself thrall economic social disparities often greater than those era. this new configuration, Andrew van der Vlies put it, is so much becoming more like rest but rather world increasingly Africa, "more unequal, also concerned [End Page 162] legacies—and cases resurgence—of restrictive exclusionary ideologies, at whim non-state actors speculative capital" (ix). Remains Social grapples two crucial issues emerge from above sketch. First, book addresses question exactly now. This simple answer, attested range hyphenated periodizations proliferated academic scholarship: post-post-apartheid, postanti-apartheid, post-transitional—all attempts terms nation's inability move beyond past. Certainly, today can no longer be called good faith rainbow nation, although occasional lip service still paid ideals nonracial harmony nation building. But neither simply extension aspects persist, unaltered form. The key term Social, unhyphenated "postapartheid," marks unwillingness accede clean delineations historical periods. postapartheid, editors indicate, does name period condition which cannot disavowed. lexical gimmick: methodologically opens scope study archive straddles pre-1994 post-1994 It signals collection's break powerful tradition African cultural studies aimed episteme. influential 2004 article, Sarah Nuttall argued "over-determined reality apartheid" (732) proposed fixation on led critics overlook emergence temporal formations—forms what she called, later work, "entanglement." By contrast, repeatedly insists imaginatively outmaneuvered must instead "worked through" (this psychoanalytic recurs throughout collection). I take broad argument collection "post-apartheid" focus instantiations such dangerous blindness present-day mutations apartheid, which, implied, always already lodged within modernity. Rather, therefore, asking contributors end itself—that is, imagine ways realm might transformed, repaired, unified, 163] rethought—the asked...