Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid (review)

A collection of essays, almost all of which have been published in earlier versions over the past ten years, Entanglement is more than the sum of its parts: the essays are united in their rigorous attention to shifting articulations of race in postapartheid South Africa, to sites and processes of desegregation as well as more ominous examples of resegregation, and in both the introduction and conclusion to the volume Sarah Nuttall explicitly links her theoretical framework to a political perspective, arguing that “the examination of the idea of desegregation constitutes a politics in itself” (155). The book thus offers a unique theoretico-political perspective on South African literary and cultural studies, but it also issues a series of theoretical and methodological challenges of broader, comparative interest: Nuttall criticizes the “overemphasis on difference” in much postcolonial theory and on “tropes of translatability” in cultural theory more generally (8, 122); argues against “symptomatic” or “theological” modes of reading and attempts to develop a “more secular, horizontal” mode as a counterpoint to their “hermeneutic over-determination” (86); calls for attention to the “imaginative possibilities and unexpected consequences of commodification” and asks us to “take the surface more seriously” in analysis of contemporary cultural forms (7, 15); and concludes with a particularly provocative rejection of Foucauldian and Adornian models of oppositionality in favor of what she calls a “politics of the emergent” that is alert to “the potential, both latent and surfacing, for imminent change” (158). Not all of these positions are entirely or equally persuasive, and Nuttall’s theoretico-political perspective, while powerful, carries its own limitations, but the volume remains an important contribution to South African literary/cultural studies that should also resonate with cultural critics working on the contemporary in other spaces shaped by histories of violence and racism.

Nuttall opens with the suggestion that the concept of entanglement “works with difference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their moments of complication” (1), and much of her introduction is devoted to tracing six “rubrics” of entanglement, six ways in which the term has been articulated, explicitly or implicitly, by other thinkers across various disciplines. Of particular importance to her project is recent work on temporal entanglement, by Achille Mbembe and others; work on the “entanglement of people and things” (7), by Bill Brown in particular; and recent work in literary studies on the ethical, and notions of “the seam” and “complicity” more specifically (5). Apropos of the latter, Nuttall suggests that Mark Sanders’s theorization of complicity as “human foldedness” (in his Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid) in particular “enables us to begin the work of thinking at the limits of apartness” (7), and this formulation could serve as a shorthand for Nuttall’s project: to think at the limits of apartness, to think beyond apartheid (both theoretically and temporally) and the critical models that it has shaped. Nuttall also admits, however, that the concept of entanglement “carries perhaps its most profound possibilities in relation to race,” and in elaborating the concept of racial entanglement she affiliates her work most closely with Paul Gilroy’s call for (in Nuttall’s words) “a rearticulation of an anti-racist vision—as a politics in itself” (2, 9). She argues that a notion of entanglement helps us look for the “transgressions,” in a context of rigid, legislated racial boundaries, “without which daily life for oppressor and oppressed would have been impossible,” and that it enables an “interrogation, imperatively, of the counter-racist and the work of desegregation” (12). In her first chapter, Nuttall extends this analysis by arguing that a “creolité hypothesis” (22), if sufficiently attentive to “paradigms of violence and mobility, spatiality and circulation” (24), can be particularly productive for a “sustained reading of the present, or the ‘now,’” as a way to “supersede interpretive models based on configurations of the past” (20). In her own reading of this “now,” Nuttall argues that “race appears to be hardening in the public political realm precisely...