Suren Pillay

Crime, Community and the Governance of Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The South African government has embarked on a programme of encouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemming from high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, to foster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised and stratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergent forms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities evolving in the post-apartheid period show tendencies toward fragmentation rather than unification, undermining efforts of ‘nation-building’.

Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp

Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.

Locations of violence: Political rationality and death squads in apartheid South Africa

From the 1970s to the early 1990s members of the anti-apartheid opposition, in South Africa and outside, were subjected to a range of horrifically violent and illegal acts, including assassinations. During the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which started in 1995, it emerged that these acts were the work of various agencies or ‘death squads’ set up within the state in the late 1960s. South Africans who had sailed oblivious through a civil war were battered by gut-wrenching and graphic accounts of sensational violence. A violence that resists comprehension, because this violence, the grisly gore of it, can by its sheer scale, its sheer brutality, become an object of awe in itself.

Where do you belong? Natives, foreigners and apartheid South Africa

The paper explores the discursive shifts of the meaning of ‘belonging’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Through a discussion of the disciplinary conceptions of belonging within historiographical and anthropological studies, it argues that these shifts are implicated in complex ways with what should be seen as differentiated settler–colonial and settler–nationalist projects.

Thinking the State from Africa: Political Theory, Eurocentrism and Concrete Politics

ABSTRACT This paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project that we have underway at University of Western Cape, to rethink Political Theory and Philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last two years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and ‘decolonizing knowledge’. The second part of this paper will offer a description of a course that I have been teaching at Honours and Masters level on Political Violence and the Modern State. In recounting these two projects I wish to contribute to possible ways we might reconstitute the genealogy of the modern state from an African vantage point, and therefore to think about how this might be done in a way that is not Eurocentric.

Transmission, obligation and movement: an interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne†

As debates about the decolonisation of knowledge define the present history of the South African academy, it has become apparent that the terms of the debate seem both new and familiar. New in the sense that they are taking place within their own distinctive conjuncture. And familiar in the sense that they are being conducted in terms and repertoires of critique that recall earlier debates in the formerly colonised world, particularly in relation to political decolonisation. The present is perhaps distinct for the prominence it gives to the relationship between political freedom and cultural sovereignty and the injunction to bring the two into alignment. Yet, how do we think these different conjunctures and the generations that they span, as part of a “tradition” of thought? The interview here is then a part of a larger project by the authors to both archive and to think the present in relation to the lineages and genealogies of critical thought in and about Africa.

The Prerogative of Civilized Peoples: Apartheid, Law, and Politics

In 1965 apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. Taking apartheid as a moment in the career of colonial law in South Africa, Pillay’s essay considers the political effects of a debate among a section of South Africa’s liberal critics. It hinged on whether or not to work within the categories of apartheid law, and what the strategic yield of that choice might be politically. In reconsidering this debate, this article explores the relationship between law and politics and considers how working within the legal tradition of colonial and apartheid law framed the objects of political criticism, making more prominent the problem of human rights violations, and rendering more obscure the foundational settler colonial question. It considers whether the politics of this choice was to have the effect of bringing apartheid as such into question, or whether its effect was rather a civilizational one: to secure the law, as a Western legal tradition on the southernmost tip of Africa.

Anti‐colonialism, post‐colonialism and the ‘new man’

The question of writing a different history of ‘Man’, the creation of the New Man, is a project that is found in the writings of such intellectuals as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. In this article an attempt is made to develop some thoughts on the ways in which anti‐colonialism, and later post‐colonialism, seeks to think about the creation of, and problematise, the New Man, and the place of collective subjectivity in this project.The question of writing a different history of ‘Man’, the creation of the New Man, is a project that is found in the writings of such intellectuals as C. L. R. James, Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon. In this article an attempt is made to develop some thoughts on the ways in which anti‐colonialism, and later post‐colonialism, seeks to think about the creation of, and problematise, the New Man, and the place of collective subjectivity in this project.

Read the world as closely as you would a book

The practice of reading, and of reading the canonical authors of the West in particular, lost its innocence after Saids Orientalism (1978). Teasing out assumptions, silences, biases, absences and stereotypes are now integral to the technical work of appraising prose and poetic form and syntactic structure.