When was South African history ever postcolonial?
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Date
2008
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
History Department, UWC
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
South African history, Postcolonialism, Apartheid, Historiography
Citation
Lalu, Premesh. (2008). When was South African history ever postcolonial? Kronos: Southern African Histories, No.34: 267-281