Thus Neil Lazarus argues that the idea that South Africa is a nation at all is the perpetration of a violence; Grant Farred invokes a disgruntled, historically-enfranchised white subject and a discontented black subject and looks for an oppositional place, the zone of what he calls the ‘not yet political’; while Shaun Irlam finds that ‘the New South Africa has ushered in an era of identity mongering and separate development on a scale that South Africa’s old bosses incessantly promoted at an ideological level’. Grant Farred’s work, in particular, relies on that of Carl Schmitt. Politics, for Schmitt, involves friends and enemies, which means at the very least the centrality of those who are with you and those against whom you struggle. People will, according to Schmitt, only be responsible for who they are if the reality of death and conflict remain present.
This, then, constitutes the first critical moment adopted by literary scholars in response to the demise of apartheid and to its aftermath – a political and critical mode which I have characterised as one of reiteration and return. A second critical moment approaches the prognostics of change in terms of a representational shift, according to a more future-inflected politics. In order to approach an as yet nameless present, scholars have tried to propose and shape expanded critical vocabularies. Among them are Leon de Kock, who argues for a notion of ‘the seam’ (an idea he draws from Noel Mostert’s book Frontiers) to denote the place where difference and sameness are hitched together – where they are brought to self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms; Michael Titlestad, who, analysing jazz representation in literature and reportage, concerns himself with forms of epistemological itinerancy, with ‘transverse drifts through a set of theoretical possibilities’; Mark Sanders’s notion of complicity as marking the limits of a theory of ‘apartness’ and Isabel Hofmeyr, whose interest is in tracking the ‘post-resistance’ formations which traverse neo-Marxist and nationalist accounts of literary and cultural work in this country.
Precursors of these critical positions include my argument with Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000), that South African studies have, for a long time, been overdetermined by the reality of apartheid – as if, in the historical trajectory of the country, apartheid was inevitable in terms of both its origins and its consequences; as if everything led to it and everything flows as a consequence of it. We worked from the idea that other historical possibilities were out there, and are evolving now, in the aftermath of that oppressive system. That there are continuities between the apartheid past and the present we fully acknowledged. Apartheid social engineering did and still does work to fix spaces that are difficult to break down in the present. There is no question about this. But, we contended, there are also enough configurations in various spheres of contemporary South African life to warrant new kinds of explorations and tools of analysis. To confine these configurations to a lens of ‘difference’ embedded squarely in the apartheid past misses the complexity and contemporaneity of their formations.
Jolly and Attridge (1998) have argued for a syncretic analytical practice, suggesting that the problem lies in ‘our fixation on difference’, in its ‘fetishization’ (p 3) Likewise, Elleke Boehmer (1998) has shown that cultural form was used ‘as a front for other kinds of communication – for political imperatives, for the telling of history, for informing the world about apartheid’, with the result that it has been shaped by circumstance, rather than actively doing the work of shaping its material; that it is hesitant about what Boehmer calls ‘form-giving’ (p 53). Rita Barnard, in her work on South African literature, has long displayed an interest in ‘new possibilities of transcending the Manichean opposition of coloniser and colonised and of moving towards a new culturally-hybrid democracy’ (2006).
Critics working within the second moment outlined above have worked in large part with the historical archive. This is important since a theory of the present requires that we work out how we relate to the past and its remainders. Besides, these critics work in such a way that we can draw on their theoretical paradigms in the present. Nevertheless, what we need now is a critical approach which can draw present and past more fully together within a compelling analytical lens. Our critical archive, in other words, remains somewhat bifurcated in this temporal sense. In what follows I try to elaborate on the notion of entanglement, which I broached in the Introduction, as it might apply to specific instances in the historical and contemporary South African archive.
Entanglement, as I use the term here, is intended less to imply that we contest that forms of separation and difference do still occur, materially and epistemologically, than to draw into our analyses critical attention to those sites and spaces in which what was once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. There are several ways of doing this. One of these is to revisit, in the aftermath of official segregation, the concept of segregated space in socio-historical terms and use this as a methodological device for reading the post-apartheid situation; the second is to undertake a sustained reading of the present, or the ‘now’, as I have referred to it here, in order to supersede interpretative models based on configurations of the past. In what follows I try to draw on both analytic possibilities.
This chapter consists of three parts – fragments, possible registers, or, as I will indicate, methods of reading – as a way of approaching the issues set out above. The first part considers how a theory of entanglement might draw on aspects of a rich body of international work on creolité to raise important questions seldom asked of the South African cultural archive. The second considers regional variations in how we might approach such a body of work locally, and the third looks at conceptions of race and class in the light of the foregoing analysis. The chapter concludes by considering a series of inflections we might give to a notion of entanglement based on the material considered, and on the ways in which entanglement speaks to the work of desegregation, both as theoretical undertaking and as political praxis.
On creolisation
One of my interests in reading the ‘now’ in South Africa has been to consider how scholarly work done elsewhere on creolité might be deployed in the context of contemporary South Africa, specifically in relation to how to come to terms with a legacy of violence in a society based on inequality. The assumption, made most often by Marxist critics, has been that processes of creolisation are devoid of conflict – in other words, that these processes are not grounded in materialities and therefore that the use of the term as a theoretical tool results in the sidelining of the more crucial issues of class struggles, social hierarchies and inequalities.
In the context of South Africa theorists have tended to be uncomfortable with debates about creolisation. Two of the major reasons for this have been, first, the presupposition that ‘creolisation’ is tantamount to ‘colouredness’ as a biological and cultural construct and second, the apartheid state’s construction of colouredness as a political buffer between blacks and whites, and the interpellation of ‘colouredness’ as neither black nor white (according to an ideology of racial purity), a notion that was both racist and suspect.
Zoë Wicomb (1998), Zimitri Erasmus (2001) and Desirée Lewis (2001) have all written about ‘colouredness’ as having been constructed and experienced as a residual, supplementary identity ‘in-between’ whiteness and blackness and interpellated in relation to registers of respectability and (sexualised) shame. Erasmus, in the introduction to her edited collection Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, argues, however, that ‘colouredness must be understood as a creolised cultural identity’. Coloured identities are distinguished not merely by the fact of borrowing per se, she argues, ‘but by cultural borrowing and creation under very specific conditions of creolisation’ (p 16). For Erasmus creolisation refers to ‘cultural creativity under conditions of marginality’ and she draws on Edouard Glissant’s notion of ‘entanglement’ to elucidate her use of the term. In particular she makes use of Glissant’s notion that diversion – turning away from the pain and difficulty of creolised beginnings – needs to be complemented by reversion – a return to the point of entanglement, the point of difficulty (p 24).
It seems to me that a ‘creolité hypothesis’ might be applied
