to whom, and the limits of that gesture. Sanders’s notion of complicity in its wide (rather than punitive) sense enables us to begin the work of thinking at the limits of apartness.
The fourth rubric I want to consider is an entanglement of people and things. Although Tim Burke (1996) does not use this particular term he argues that Marx’s definition of commodity fetishism does not leave sufficient room for the complexity of relations between things and people, nor for the imaginative possibilities and unexpected consequences of commodification, or the intricate emotional and intellectual investments made by individuals within commodity culture. Bill Brown (2003) has argued that cultural theory and literary criticism require a comparably new idiom, beginning with the effort to think with or through the physical object world, the effort to establish a genuine sense of things that comprise the stage on which human action, including the action of thought, unfolds. He concedes a new historicist desire to ‘make contact with the real’4 but more than this, he wishes to locate an approach which reads ‘like a grittier, materialist phenomenology of everyday life, a result that might somehow arrest language’s wish, as described by Michael Serrès (1987, p 111), that “the whole world … derive from language”’.5 Brown tells a tale of possession – of being possessed by possessions – and suggests that this amounts to ‘something stranger’ (p 5) than the history of a culture of consumption. It is not just a case of the way commodity relations come to saturate everyday life but the human investment in the physical object world and the mutual constitution, or entanglement, of human subject and inanimate object. He aims to sacrifice the clarity of thinking about things as objects of consumption in order to see how our relation to things cannot be explained by the cultural logic of capitalism. He makes the case for a kind of possession that is irreducible to ownership (p 13). This is a relatively new field of work that has only just begun to surface, but one I want to bear in mind in relation to several of the chapters which follow.
While each of the four rubrics of entanglement explored above takes us a considerable way towards a critique of an over-emphasis on difference in much of the scholarship produced within African and postcolonial studies in recent decades, none of them considers the new frontier of DNA research. The fifth rubric worth consideration here has to do with the implications of the DNA signature. New attention has been paid globally and in post-apartheid South Africa to the fact that tracing the ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ genetic lines visible on each individual’s X and Y chromosomes allows scientists to generate ‘ancestral maps’ charting the geographical location of ancestors closer to us in time. Identities suggested by ancestral DNA signatures undercut the rigid conceptions of racial identity in which both colonial rule and apartheid were based.
Kerry Bystrom (2007) has reported in her work how renowned satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, classified as white under apartheid, learned that he had a maternal line African gene. His response was: ‘That’s really nice. So I’m an African. No people with black skin can point a finger at me.’ With his typically sharp sense of irony and wit, Uys, as Bystrom points out, ‘puts his finger on what is simultaneously wonderful and troubling about the ways in which “African” identity can be expanded through genetic and familial mapping’. This new version of the evolutionary family story both provides biological legitimation for racial equality and opens up ways to conceptualise a non-racial South African identity. On the other hand, as Bystrom points out, there is a way in which, as Uys’s comment forces us to consider, the project of defining a broadly inclusive genetic South African identity risks effacing the divisions entrenched, and legislated for, by apartheid. Entanglement, as suggested within this discourse, is both productive and reductive. The DNA debate does the work of de-familiarisation: it has the ability, as Bystrom writes, to ‘render the familiar strange and the strange familiar’.
This brings me to the final rubric I want to consider here, one which has been implicit in some of what has been discussed above but which requires explicit elucidation, and that is the notion of racial entanglement. In the late 1970s Eduard Glissant, reflecting on the issue of race, identity and belonging in the Caribbean (1992), used the term entanglement to refer to the ‘point of difficulty’ of creolised beginnings. ‘We must return,’ he wrote, ‘to the point from which we started, not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish (p 26).6
Globally the 1990s gave rise to a new focus on race and ethnicity, falling largely within two contending lines of thought. The first strand, widely known as critical race studies, paid renewed attention to racism and identity. It focused on ‘hidden, invisible forms of racist expression and well-established patterns of racist exclusion that remain unaddressed and uncompensated for, structurally marking opportunities and access, patterns of income and wealth, privilege and relative power’ (Essed & Goldberg 2002, p 4). ‘Critical race studies’ finds institutional racism, patterns of racial exclusion, and structurally marked patterns of access as prevalent as before, if not more so. Such work draws on the writings of Du Bois, Fanon, Carmichael, Gramsci, Davis, Carby and Roediger, among many others, to articulate the nature of racial hegemony in the contemporary world, but especially in the United States.
A second, contrasting, strand of race studies approached the contemporary question of race in a manner which takes us closer to the idea of entanglement. For Paul Gilroy (2000) racial markers are not immutable in time and space. Gilroy, like a number of writers before him, including Fanon and Said, has argued for a humanism conceived explicitly as a response to the sufferings that racism and ‘race thinking’ have wrought. He argues that in the 21st century race politics and anti-racist laws have not created an equal society and that what is needed in response is a re-articulation of an anti-racist vision – as a politics in itself. In his view, the most valuable resources for the elaboration of such a humanism derive from ‘a principled, cross-cultural approach to the history and literature of extreme situations in which the boundaries of what it means to be human were being negotiated and tested minute by minute, day by day’ (p 87).
In more recent work, Gilroy (2004) has drawn on the resources of a vibrant and complex ‘multiculture’ in both Britain and the United States to reveal an alternative discourse of race already at work in contemporary life. In their work on whiteness, Vron Ware and Les Back challenge a discourse of ‘separate worlds’, which, in their view, structures so much contemporary thinking about race (especially in the United States), finding it to be a ‘bleak formula’, a prepackaged view of the world which suggests that ‘how you look largely determines how you see’ (p 17). What difference does it make, they ask, when people in societies structured according to racial dominance turn away from the privilege inherent in whiteness? Or when the anti-race act is performed, by whom, and in whose company?
John Hartigan (1999) argues that public debate and scholarly discussion on the subject of race are burdened by allegorical tendencies (he writes about the United States, but much of what he says refers directly to South Africa too). Abstract racial figures, he writes, ‘dominate our thinking, each condensing the specificities of peoples’ lives into strictly delimited categories – “whites and blacks” to name the most obvious’.
Given the national stage on which the dramas of race unfold, certain broad readings of racial groups across the country are warranted, Hartigan concedes. But as such spectacles ‘come to represent the meaning of race relations, they obscure the many complex encounters, exchanges and avoidances that constitute the persistent significance of race in the United States’ (p 3). On the one hand, social researchers grapple with the enduring effect of racism and rely on the figures of ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ to do this; on the other, they argue, unconvincingly, it seems, that races are mere social constructs. ‘How are we to effect a change in Americans’ tendency to view social life through a lens of “black and white” when we rely upon and reproduce the same categories in our analyses and critiques of the way race matters in this country?,’ he asks (p 3). The argument here is that we can loosen the powerful hold of the cultural figures of ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ by challenging
