in which the significance of race spills out of the routinised confines of these absolute figures, we can begin to rethink the institutionalisation of racial difference and similarity.
In South African literary and cultural scholarship there has been, since the mid-1990s, a departure from earlier work in which race was largely left unproblematised and was treated as a given category in which difference was essentialised. Such work had focused, like the anti-apartheid movement itself, on fighting legalised and institutionalised racism rather than on analysing the making of racial identity per se. In more recent work, however, there has been an insistence on race in order to deconstruct it (Steyn 2001; Distiller & Steyn 2004; Erasmus 2001; Ebrahim-Vally 2001). Thus Distiller & Steyn, in their book Under Construction: ‘Race’ and Identity in South Africa Today, aim to address the ‘need for a vocabulary of race in South Africa today’ (p 2) and to ‘challenge the artificiality of “whiteness” and “blackness” and to explore the implications of an insistence on policing their boundaries and borders’ (p 7). Significantly, the first South African academic conference dedicated to the issue of race took place only in 2001, co-hosted by the newly formed Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and the Wits History Workshop, and entitled ‘The Burden of Race’.
These, then, are some of the ways in which the term entanglement has been used by scholars, or indirectly suggested in their work. I draw strongly on them in the chapters that follow. Although I frame them in my own analytical grammar, each carries traces of the above articulation by other scholars. Entanglement offers, for me, a rubric in terms of which we can begin to meet the challenge of the ‘after apartheid’. It is a means by which to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from a common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience. It enables a complex temporality of past, present and future; one which points away from a time of resistance towards a more ambivalent moment in which the time of potential, both latent and actively surfacing in South Africa, exists in complex tandem with new kinds of closure and opposition. It also signals a move away from an apartheid optic and temporal lens towards one which reifies neither the past nor the exceptionality of South African life.
A focus on entanglement in part speaks to the need for a utopian horizon, while always being profoundly mindful of what is actually going on. Such a horizon carries particular weight in societies which confront the precariousness of life, crime, poverty, AIDS and violence on a daily basis; it suggests the importance, too, of holding ‘heretical conversations’ in order to question and even, at times, dislodge or supersede the tropes and analytical foci which quickly harden into conventions of how we read the ‘now’. So, too, reading through entanglement makes it necessary to find registers for writing about South Africa that enable properly trans-national conversations.
Entanglement, as I use it in the chapters which follow, enables us to work with the idea that the more racial boundaries are erected and legislated the more we have to look for the transgressions without which everyday life for oppressor and oppressed would have been impossible. It helps us, too, to find a method of reading which is about a set of relations, some of them conscious but many of them unconscious, which occur between people who most of the time try to define themselves as different.
Entanglement, furthermore, returns us to a concept of the human where we do not necessarily expect to find it. It enables an interrogation, imperatively, of the counter-racist and the work of desegregation. Since the chapters which follow take up these issues from the vantage point of South Africa they enable a conversation with preoccupations in contemporary humanities scholarship elsewhere, and reveal aspects of what South Africa can contribute to global debates about identity, power and race. Entanglement provides a suggestive way to draw together these theoretical threads. It is an idea I draw on throughout the book, without underestimating, I hope, what makes people different, how they think they are different (even when they might not be), and how difference has a charged and volatile history in this country.
The first chapter seeks a defamiliarising way of reading the historical and contemporary South African cultural archive by employing a lens of entanglement. One of the aspects the chapter explores is the possibilities and limits of an Anglicised and Africanised category of the creole. Within the larger rubric of entanglement it places a specific emphasis on how to come to terms with a legacy of violence in a society based on inequality, drawing on creolisation’s own origins within the historical experience of slavery and its aftermath. It goes on to re-examine, in the light of this initial discussion, regional variations and the implications for how we read race and class in South Africa.
The chapter moves away from what Hofmeyr (2005) has referred to as the ‘hydraulic models of domination and resistance’ traversing neo-Marxist and nationalist accounts towards a project of making ‘the ambiguous networks and trajectories of the postcolonial state legible’ (p 130). It looks for analytical formations which increasingly inscribe South African life into a body of work done elsewhere on the continent, especially Mbembe’s (1993) idea that oppressor and oppressed do not inhabit incommensurate spheres: rather, that they share the same episteme. It moves across disciplines, searching for disturbances, fluctuations, oscillations in conventional accounts, looking for configurations of space, identity, race and class usually left unexpressed, and dormant.
In Chapter Two, entitled ‘Literary City’, I write about ways in which Johannesburg is emerging in recent city fiction. I explore, that is, notions of entanglement from the vantage point of city life and city forms, of the making of citiness in writing. ‘Citiness’ refers to modes of being and acting in the city as city and it encompasses histories of violence, loss and xenophobia as well as those of experimentation and desegregation.
My aim in the chapter is to explore the modes of metropolitan life – the ‘infrastructures’ – which come to light in contemporary fiction of the city. These infrastructures include the street, the café, the suburb and the campus – assemblages of citiness in which fictional life worlds intersect with the actual, material rebuilding of the post-apartheid city. I explore some of the figures to which these urban infrastructures give rise: the stranger, the aging white man, the suburban socialite, the hustler.
Of particular interest is what the metropolitan form can offer, via its fictional texts, in relation to the remaking of race. To what kinds of separation and connectedness does it give rise? In what ways, if at all, does it exceed the metaphors of race and the binaries to which it gives rise and how, as Helgesson (2006) puts it, do characters move through and across long-established representational regimes? Citiness in Johannesburg, I argue, is an intricate entanglement of éclat and sombreness, light and darkness, comprehension and bewilderment, polis and necropolis, desegregation and resegregation.
In Chapter Three I focus on autobiographies and related narratives of the self written by whites from the mid-1990s onwards, a period which, in my view, marks a major shift in the ways in which whiteness began to be looked at as the embeddedness of race in the legal and political fabric of South Africa started to crack.
The chapter, entitled ‘Secrets and Lies’, develops a set of arguments around, on the one hand, looking and watching, modes which appear to inhabit certain versions of ‘unofficial’ whiteness (the act of watching others watching the self, for instance) but on the other, and more predominantly, around the secrets and sometimes the lies, which inhabit the negotiation of whiteness. In almost all the bodies of work considered confronting one’s whiteness is also confronting one’s secret life, including the untruths – latent, blatant, imminent, potent – that inhabit the white self.
The chapter aims to offer an alternative route through the South African archive of whiteness by attending to what I have called its ‘unofficial’ versions, within a context of long-held racist assumptions and practices. Thus it considers some of the resources available in South African society to crack open the discourses of whiteness,
