Apartheid's Endless Itineraries

For many decades now South Africa has worn the mantle of global exemplarity. During the 1980s, South Africa was, in Derrida's phrase, "racism's last word" (le dernier mot du racisme), a place where European racial thinking had reached its apogee (and, one hoped, its culminating endpoint). Following the collapse of the apartheid regime and the democratic elections of 1994, it became, under the sign of Nelson Mandela, the "rainbow nation": a concrete illustration of the quasi-miraculous overcoming of racial oppression through empathy and forgiveness and a beacon for other nations struggling with violent histories. In recent years, however, even as the burnished image of Mandela has been iconized around the world, South Africans themselves have come to suspect, with some discomfort, that their country means something else: a disappointment by or betrayal of political ideals. Promises made—regarding jobs, land, housing—have not been kept; an endemic corruption has set in to consolidate an elite political class; coarse and explicit varieties of racism, after strategically keeping their heads down, have resurfaced; and the country has found itself in the thrall of economic and social disparities often greater than those of the apartheid era. In this new configuration, as Andrew van der Vlies has put it, it is not so much that South Africa is becoming more like the rest of the world, but rather that the world is increasingly becoming more like South Africa, "more unequal, but also concerned with the legacies—and in some cases the resurgence—of restrictive and exclusionary ideologies, and at the whim of non-state actors and speculative capital" (ix).

Remains of the Social grapples with two crucial issues that emerge from the above sketch. First, the book addresses the question of where exactly South Africa is now. This is not a simple question to answer, as is attested to by the range of hyphenated periodizations that have proliferated in academic scholarship: the post-post-apartheid, the postanti-apartheid, the post-transitional—all attempts to come to terms with the nation's inability to move beyond its apartheid past. Certainly, the South Africa of today can no longer be called in good faith the rainbow nation, although occasional lip service is still paid to ideals of nonracial harmony and nation building. But neither is it simply an extension of the apartheid nation, although many aspects of apartheid persist, often in unaltered form.

The key term in Remains of the Social, the unhyphenated "postapartheid," marks an unwillingness to accede to clean delineations of historical periods. The postapartheid, as the editors indicate, does not name a historical period so much as a condition in which apartheid cannot be disavowed. This is more than a lexical gimmick: it methodologically opens the scope of the study to an archive that straddles the nation's pre-1994 and post-1994 histories. It also signals the collection's break from a powerful tradition in South African cultural studies that has aimed to move beyond the apartheid episteme. In an influential 2004 article, Sarah Nuttall argued that South African studies had been "over-determined by the reality of apartheid" (732) and proposed that the fixation on apartheid had led critics to overlook the emergence of new cultural and temporal formations—forms of what she called, in a later work, "entanglement." By contrast, Remains of the Social repeatedly insists that apartheid cannot be imaginatively outmaneuvered but must instead be "worked through" (this psychoanalytic term recurs throughout this collection). I take the broad argument of this collection to be that the "post-apartheid" focus on new instantiations of the social as such has led to a dangerous blindness to the present-day mutations of apartheid, which, it is implied, is always already lodged within global modernity. Rather, therefore, than asking their contributors to take the social as an end in itself—that is, to imagine ways in which the social realm might be transformed, repaired, unified, or rethought—the editors have asked...