Premesh Lalu

Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project

This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex epistemological, political, and technical challenges that they confronted in their endeavor to construct a digital archive that might help reorient scholarly debates on the struggle for liberation.

Still searching for ‘the human’

Since taking up a research fellowship on the humanities in the age of techné at Amherst College in the United States for my sabbatical year, I have spoken with pride about the foresight of South Africa’s National Research Foundation and the department of science and technology back home. My colleagues at Amherst were especially encouraged by my announcement that the research foundation had opted to broaden the allocation of research chairs to include humanities and social science scholars. This was more than could be expected in the US, especially in its public institutions, where talk of crisis had cast an air of doom and gloom over the oncethriving intellectual pursuits of the humanities. But then came last week’s announcement of the 60 new foundation research chairs. A ‘palpable snub’ is how the dean of the arts faculty at the University of the Western Cape broke the news to me. He was referring to the refusal to allocate even one of these chairs to the humanities. In the haste common to our times, I shot off my protests through Facebook, soliciting support for my dismay and protest. I thoughtlessly proclaimed that, with the foundation’s decision, we in the humanities might as well pack our bags and go home. I was certainly overcome with despair – and the feeling of utter rejection deepened later in the week when a philanthropic organisation said a proposal on the subject of the humanities, submitted by the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape for funding support, did not meet the new focus on early childhood education and youth unemployment. We were told that the work of the centre was best funded by the state. Yet, from where I sat, the research foundation had not only overlooked the work that had gone into establishing the humanities as a major site of social inquiry in South Africa. It had also overlooked many of its own requirements for thinking critically about the concept of the human condition at the heart of research in a postapartheid South Africa.

The Border and the Body: Post-Phenomenological Reflections on the Borders of Apartheid

In 1975, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development published the findings of an ethnological study by A.O. Jackson detailing the ethnic composition of the Ciskei and the Transkei. The ethnological arm of the Department under the watchful eye of a senior anthropologist had emerged as critical to the historical and anthropological verification of apartheids borders, especially those concerned with the homeland policy of the state. This is what Jackson reported:

Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self-writing and the apparatus of reading

Abstract This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Bikos I Write What I Like as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history. Rather than presupposing the text as a form of biography or following a trend of translating Biko into a prophet of reconciliation, I argue that the text leads us towards the postcolonial problematic of self‐writing. That problematic, I argue, names the encounter between self‐writing and an apparatus of reading. The paper stages the encounter as a way to make explicit the texts postcolonial interests and to mark the onset of an incomplete history. This, I argue incidentally, is where the postcolonial critic may set to work to finish the critique of apartheid. Incomplete histories call attention to how that which is unintelligible in a text makes an authoritative reading difficult.

Between History and Apocalypse: Stumbling.

Apartheid rested on a division of the senses as much as it did on a reductive politics of racial subjection and its accompanying violence. As an instance of the division of the senses, it produced a condition of stasis in which history and a post-apartheid future were increasingly marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse, and a moral claim formed around family melodrama. In seeking to escape this nightmare, I ask whether we may discover in the dream of the post-apartheid a concept of stasis that does not amount to a dead end. Instead, we might return to a formulation of stasis that for the ancient Greeks approximates something akin to movement at rest. Drawing on the resources of cinema, jazz, soundtrack and memory, I argue that apartheid’s exteriorization of technology proved disastrous both for the critique of apartheid and for elaborating a concept of the post-apartheid. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is not useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. (Deleuze, 1983: 106).

Empire and Nation

In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitics of apartheid was not merely a reaction to the setting sun of the British Empire, or the dissolution of liberal reason. It was, as I will show, a response to the very question of political subjectivity in liberal discourse. Biopolitics, in contrast to ideological racism, demands a reading of empire that advances and elaborates a concept of the post-apartheid. To this end, earlier critical models that were applied to readings of empire specifically locate empires force in imperial war or the ravages of imperialism. Perhaps such critiques may be productively enlivened by a demand to keep the desire for the post-apartheid in sight. To the extent that empire always also reveals itself as the story of the postcolonial nation, might the intended critique of the South African empire afford us an opportunity to think our way out of the tragic scripts of the 19th and 20th centuries?

Where Does Sadness Come From? Politics, Potentiality and a Possible Humanities

If, as Spinoza suggests, sadness is an inadequate idea, how do we account for its mobilization in nationalist and post-colonial critiques of colonialism, neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism? How, in other words, might we see in the inadequate idea of sadness the very conditions for thinking our way into a discussion of political subjectivity that loosens the grip of biopolitics on African subjectivity? Drawing on aesthetic practices of art and film, this article argues that a fundamental shift is discernable in the careful ways in which the affect of sadness has been worked over by artists and filmmakers in Africa. This is a site of productive reworking, which not only eclipses the exhausted political sphere in Africa, but offers ways to theorize its reconstitution. To this end, the article asks that we attend to the ways in which potentiality and impotentiality are rendered as central premises for tackling the question of the renewal of political subjectivity in Africa.