Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: Metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower
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Date
2023
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Taylor and Francis Group
Abstract
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.
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Keywords
Race, Apartheid, Neoliberalism, Segregation, Biopolitics
Citation
Naidoo, K. (2023). Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: Metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower. Social Dynamics. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2023.2167425