Peter Vale

Radical Thinking in South Africa’s Age of Retreat

This article traces the rise and fall of radical praxis in South Africa and offers a critique of the prevailing practices of former Marxists under post-apartheid conditions. Western Marxism emerged in the 1970s in South Africa and Marxist activists became deeply involved in the liberation movements. With the unravelling of apartheid, the main liberation forces made a social pact with capitalist forces and former Marxists embraced a statist project. In the context of the rise of ‘new’ social movements, radical thinking of a more Libertarian kind is emerging in contemporary South Africa.

If International Relations lives on the street, what is it doing in the classroom?

The argument asserts that International Relations (IR) was (and remains) constructed to serve the interests of the knowledge courts of the north. In South Africa, the discipline is an ‘alien species’ because the imported idea of sovereignty not only disrupted natural patterns of regional migration, but the formation of the region’s first state, the Union of South Africa, divided the country’s people on the grounds of race. The coming of the Union followed upon both the Jameson Raid (1895/1896) and the Boer War (1899–1902) – the former was of interest to E.H. Carr in two instances but only as an attempt to explain events in the global north. The ‘new’ politics of southern Africa, which were based on sovereignty and the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism were ignored by Carr. The migration of IR to South Africa in the 1930s rested in an imperial frame, and the discipline helped create a European state in Africa. The author uses several autobiographical examples to suggest his own dissatisfaction with this condition by using Carr’s notion of ‘site-specificness’. The primacy of English in IR is critiqued because this language closes off perspectives of the international which are carried in other languages. The article concludes with a discussion of the way in which ‘First People’ are excluded by the deliberations around IR.

Imperial mission, ‘scientific’ method:an alternative account of the origins of IR

This article offers an alternative account of the origins of academic IR to the conventional Aberystwyth-centred one. Informed by a close reading of the archive, our narrative proposes that the ideas and method of what was to become IR were first developed in South Africa. Here, we suggest how the creation of a racially-ordered state served as a template for the British Commonwealth and later the World State. We draw further on the British dominions’ tour of Lionel Curtis, founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), between September 1909 and March 1911, to indicate how Edwardian anxieties about the future of empire fuelled the missionary zeal of imperial enthusiasts, who placed enormous trust in the ‘scientific method’ to create a unified empire. This method and the same ideas were to become central features of the new discipline of IR. By highlighting the transnational circulation of these ideas, we also provide an alternative to the nationally-limited revisionist accounts.

International relations in post‐apartheid South Africa: some anniversary questions

Shortly after apartheid ended, I found myself at a get-together organized by an in-house think-tank associated with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In the leafy surrounds of West Sussex, the conferees were hosted in the grandest tradition of rustic living—fine meals, good wine, country walks, and a rich exchange of political ideas—mostly on South and southern Africa’s future. A member of the House of Lords, who had been prominent in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Cabinet, performed the opening; she regaled the gathered with an anecdotal account of her own role in the overthrow of minority-rule in South Africa. She told us how, on the prompting of her businessman husband, she set her career goals—one of which was to end apartheid. And then, without irony, she said how happy she was that this particular goal had been achieved. When she was done, the South Africans in the room were ‘gob-smacked’: one eventually put up a hand. ‘Thank you for explaining this to us, Baroness’, a voice in an overstated South African accent said, ‘I had always thought that South Africa’s people had ended apartheid’. The appropriation of the victory over apartheid by the international community has many sides to it. An unanticipated one is the outsourcing of the public voice of South Africa’s International Relations—and the compass of its foreign policy—to non-native South Africans. The purpose of this point is not to smuggle in a mindless critique of a new policy establishment and to question either their expertise or indeed their anti-apartheid credentials: after all, patriotism, as Samuel Johnson is reported to have said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel neither; is it my intention to fan the already dangerous flames of xenophobia that have delivered such damage to the new South Africa. More appositely, perhaps, the idea of patriotism as a source of higher knowing is an obvious contradiction when presented from within an academic discipline that has been near obsessed with promoting, through the idea of globalization, the very antithesis of patriotism. And, certainly, events both on the historical and contemporary ground seem to prove that there is no link between place of birth and place of public service. So, the current US Secretary of State—like Alexander Hamilton, the American Revolutionary and primary author of the

State of urgency

William Faulkner’s appalled recognition – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ – sets the scene for many of the animating concerns of this Special Issue. This is focused on work in and debates around the humanities in South Africa, where many artists and academics appear to be wrestling with a particularly strong version of Faulkner’s dilemma. For just over 20 years after the formal dismantling of apartheid embodied in the adoption of South Africa’s new Constitution, what we are witnessing is a living on of the past, a startled recognition that the past is not even past. For the structural persistence of forms of racialized inequality at every level of society and of the economy is now becoming increasingly expressed and articulated in and through the deeply polarising debates around higher education which are largely taking place within the humanities. This persistence of the past, combined with the dictates of a national higher education policy cloned from a global template indifferent or even hostile to the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, exerts both globally familiar and locally specific pressures on the possibilities and potentials for humanist study and critical reflection. In these pages we cannot pretend to cover or fully represent the totality of work in the arts and humanities in South Africa. However, we hope that this assemblage of snapshots, glimpses and fragments of work will nonetheless work to yield some insight into the South African academy, and offer some sense of its uneasy relation to the larger forces and conflicts of the nation and the state. All of these conflicts are now rapidly coming to a head in the university system, where as we write, campuses across the country are closed due to student protests. #FeesMustFall follows on the #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015. Here, a student in a well-publicized demonstration stirred up students across the country (and beyond) by throwing a bottle of human waste over the statue – centrally placed at UCT – of the great symbol of colonialism, Cecil John Rhodes, resulting in the at least temporary and perhaps

Marxisms past and present

Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism.

The Study of Politics in South Africa: A Prolegomenon

This article anticipates the 50th Anniversary of Politikon, by suggesting themes that will need to be included in a comprehensive history of the development of the field in South Africa. It draws on Intellectual History, the Sociology of Knowledge and Institutional History to locate the development of the academic study of politics in South Africa and points to several proto-types of the discipline. Two major ‘conventions’ of Political Science are identified – one British and the other American. These traditions as well as the contributions of several political scientists are briefly discussed. The conclusion points to lacunae in the field, especially understandings of Africa and on the issue of voice.

What has happened to the humanities

ABSTRACT This is an edited version of the text of the Annual Schonland Lecture which was delivered at Rhodes University on 28th of September 2010. While honouring the contribution of Selmar and Basil Schonland, it critiques South Africas post-apartheid science policy as both utilitarian and derivative. This policy has marginalised the Humanities and the Social Sciences, which have been stripped of their citizenship in the academy.

‘Out in the middle’. Humanities, interdisciplinary and the post-graduate puzzle: An interview with Professor Wiljan van den Akker:

Wiljan van den Akker is a university professor, a respected academic administrator, and a published poet and writer. From a base at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, his three-decade long career spans three continents and includes one-on-one associations with Berkeley, UCLA and Oxford. Currently, he is the Vice-Rector for Research at Utrecht but retains the title he was awarded in 2003, Distinguished Professor of Modern Poetry. In early June 2015, Peter Vale interviewed van den Akker in his house in Jeruzalemstraat, Utrecht. This is an edited version of two conversations.

The Humanities And The University: Craig Calhoun Interviewed:

In this interview Craig Calhoun talks about universities, the Humanities and his own research. Universities reinvent themselves in the face of societal and technological change. In the midst of this change, however, universities are charged with maintaining old ideals, with informing the public and creating opportunities for human development. The Humanities often bemoan these changes but they are ideally positioned to contribute to the changing university – especially through teaching – and so protect the traditional place of the university in society. The Humanities must help to defend the canon but, at the same time, be open to new rethinking the canon by embracing alternative epistemologies. One means to do this is to opening knowledge up by embracing languages other than English. Calhoun’s own research is focussed on those ‘parts of globalisation’ that are not commonly investigated: Belonging and Identity, Social Emergencies as an exception; the fragility of Global capitalism.