Research Articles

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Since its inception in 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape has emerged as a crucial meeting point for researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences throughout Southern Africa. The Centre strives to develop unifying and interdisciplinary themes in the humanities that will enable a renewal of its study in Africa.

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Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp
(Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013) Pillay, Suren
Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of �anxious urbanity.� This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.
Apartheid and the unconscious: An introduction
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Truscott, Ross; van Bever Donker, Maurits; Hook, Derek
This special issue invited contributors to revisit J.M. Coetzee�s �The Mind of Apartheid,� first published in Social Dynamics in 1991. Here, Coetzee asks what it might mean to come to terms with apartheid:It is not inconceivable that in the not too distant future, the era of apartheid will be proclaimed to be over. The unlovely creature will be laid to rest, and joy among nations will be unconfined. But what exactly is it that will be buried? (Coetzee 1991, 1)Responding to his own question, Coetzee reads the texts of sociologist and Broederbond intellectual, Geoffrey Cronj�. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Coetzee diagnoses the version of apartheid Cronj� set out during the period between 1945 and 1948 as an obsessional neurotic �counterattack upon desire� (18). What so disturbed Cronj�, Coetzee argues, was the �blunting [afstomping]� of psychological resistances to �race-mixing� (18). But Cronj�s texts, as Coetzee reads them, also betray a psychic investment in precisely �the dissolution of difference� against which he set himself, a �fascination� with �the mixed� (21�22). Railing against miscegenation, it was always on Cronj�s mind.
Apartheid's university: Notes on the renewal of the Enlightenment
(CODESRIA, 2007) Lalu, Premesh
This paper sets to work on strategies for forging new and critical humanities at the institutional site of the university that appears to be trapped in the legacies of apartheid. The paper suggests that the university's responses to apartheid might hold the key for the realignment of its critical commitments in the post-apartheid present. Rather than merely invoking the Enlightenment traditions of the modern university as sufficient grounds for proclaiming a post-apartheid reorientation, I track the career of notions of academic freedom and university autonomy in the outlines of complicity. I show how the concepts of academic freedom and autonomy obscured a prior contract with the state and how that complicity extended a process of subjection. By deploying the postcolonial strategy of abusing the Enlightenment, the paper outlines the failure of opposing apartheid in the name of academic freedom and autonomy. That failure, I argue, resulted in an inability to investigate the relationship be�tween the university and the state and blinded the university to its role in the creation of racial subjects. Rather than merely casting the university in terms of the foundational concepts of academic freedom and university autonomy, I suggest that it might be more productive to consider the epistemological and political potential of a renewed reference to the Enlightenment. Apartheid's University, cast as continuity of the Enlightenment legacy, might allow us to rewrite its abject script in the direction of resisting the forms of subjection supported by that process of normalisation.
Auditing and the unconscious: Managerialism�s memory traces
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Truscott, Ross
This paper takes J.M. Coetzee�s �The Mind of Apartheid� as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits � and this should remain a question for deliberation � then a set of questions emerges for post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise? Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And what sort of working through the past would this call for?
Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: Metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Naidoo, Kiasha
I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an instantiation of a particular normative order, wherein contagion was used to justify the movement of black, homeless people outside of the city�s cordon sanitaire. This is resonant of apartheid racial segregation in which the fear of race mixing is sometimes described in terms of contagion where whiteness repre-sents that which is pure while blackness that which is dirty and infectious.
Crime, community and the governance of violence in post-apartheid South Africa
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2008) Pillay, Suren
The South African government has embarked on a programme ofencouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemmingfrom high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, tofoster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised andstratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergentforms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities evolvingin the post-apartheid period show tendencies toward fragmentation rather thanunification, undermining efforts of �nation-building�.
Performing the struggle against apartheid opposing apartheid on stage: King Kong the musical
(Cambridge University Press, 2023) Layne, Valmont Edward
Tyler Fleming�s book provides an account of the first production of �King Kong� � a musical theatre production based on the life of the boxer Ezekiel Dlamini � in 1959. This musical rankled the apartheid state partly because it affirmed the aspirations of a Black urban class against an official state narrative which preferred a Black rural population. As a story of Black urban life that crossed over for mainstream white audiences, and became part of the canon and lore of South African theatre and popular music, the play stands as a landmark in South African cultural history. Fleming�s well-researched study considers the ways in which the multiracial production confronted petty apartheid legislation. The author offers an abundance of empirical detail on the play�s production, its human and sociopolitical context, and furthers our understanding of African participation in cultural trends � in this case, musical theatre � by invoking Paul Gilroy�s �Black Atlantic� to argue for a multiplicity of perspectives on cultural production. Yet Fleming�s narrative exegesis remains firmly within the discipline of social history, at the expense of accounting for broader theoretical implications of the work.
A �poor man�s pleasure�: The cinema house and its publics in twentieth century South Africa
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) de Almeida, Fernanda Pinto
What do cinema houses have to tell us about the experience ofcollective leisure in early twentieth-century South Africa? Thisarticle considers how the cinema house points to unprecedentedsocial conditions that allowed the emergence of new publics.Drawing on scholarship on the development of cinema in SouthAfrica, the article considers how the historical transformationsthrough which the cinema has passed since the 1910s suggestattempts to domesticate the space of projection of the cinema aswell as the formation of new cinema audiences. Diverging fromreadings of the cinema in South Africa that focus onfilm, thearticle considers how the cinema house is inscribed in thisscholarship as an evocative cipher of incipient publics and as ametaphor for the containment of a new public sphere during theperiods of segregation and Apartheid.
When was South African history ever postcolonial?
(History Department, UWC, 2008) Lalu, Premesh
In this article I argue that what enabled affiliation to the larger political project against apartheid was precisely the production of a subject that was always, and necessarily, threaded through a structure of racial capitalism. This hinders the emergence of a history of colonialism and nationalism that theorises and historicises the relations of knowledge and power.In what I am calling a postcolonial critique of apartheid, I make explicit the way the question of knowledge and power was often exchanged for historicist constructions of historical change, especially in relation to the transition from the apartheid to the postapartheid. Tangential to my argument is a reminder of the way the native question in the first half of the twentieth-century produced a disciplinary upheaval in South African knowledge projects by combining the impulses drawn from colonial discourse and nationalist anti-colonial narration. Herein we might encounter the problem of South African radical historiography, and its concomitant constructions of the postapartheid.

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