Preface

TRANSFORMATION 79 (2012) ISSN 0258-7696 i Preface This special issue of Transformation emerges from a colloquium, ‘Revisiting Apartheid Race Categories’. The event was co-hosted by the School of Human and Community Development, the Transformation Office and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, and by the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,inOctober,2010.Itgatheredscholarsfromvariousdisciplines, practitioners, researchers, activists and university executives from a range of research, non-governmental and higher education institutions across South Africa. Several participants straddled these roles, making for rich presentations. Somewhat different from previous focused issues, this one offers a peerreviewed selection of contributions to the above mentioned colloquium, along with responses to individual articles, and to clusters of articles on related themes. Its aim is twofold: to share with readers a sense of what is remembered as a process of robust and fruitful intellectual exchange, and to raise initial questions for further productive exchange on the uses of ‘race’ and apartheid race categories in contemporary South Africa. The issue has three parts. Part one grapples with some theoretical dilemmas of uses of ‘race’ and its attendant administrative categories. An editorial essay opens this first part. It locates the content, frames and introduces the contributions, and weaves into these tasks related issues from recent literature. Part two provides selected cases and examples of uses of ‘race’ and of apartheid race categories from South Africa. Part three pays specific attention to the law in post-1994 South Africa. The volume closes with reflections on the colloquium proceedings as a whole. Our hope is that readers find these cross-disciplinary conversations as insightful as did participants in the colloquium. Toward further conversation – always. ZimitriErasmus Gerhard Maré ...