Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

/pdf/modern-social-imaginaries-3bxtlxvdjy.pdf

Modern Social Imaginaries

Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest

Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the College de France on this topic, as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: (1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigati...

Another Politics of Life is Possible

This paper is an analysis of state practice in respect of racial classification and its epistemological underpinnings in twentieth-century South Africa. It shows how apartheid racial categories—drawing heavily on those enacted by the segregationist state—were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control by a state animated by fantasies of omniscience as much as omnipotence. The architects of apartheid racial classification policies recognized explicitly that racial categories were constructs, rather than descriptions of real essences—a version of the idea of race which enabled the bureaucratization of “common sense” notions of racial difference and which contributed direcdy to the enormous powers wielded by racial classifiers. If constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The ubiquity of the state's racial designations, and the extent to which they meshed with lived hierarchies of class and status, meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa

Among the many paradoxes of South Africa’s transition from apartheid, one of the more obvious and prominent concerns the fate of race. We have been entrusted with a new democratic constitution that enshrines a thoroughgoing commitment to non-racialism, invoking the claim to our common humanity as the basis for the allocation of shared human rights and the eradication of discrimination. But this juridical assertion of human sameness cohabits with existential reiterations of racial difference and separation. An interesting survey conducted by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation gives some indication of the lingering power of racial reasoning in the everyday lives of South African citizens. Disturbing proportions of respondents make lifestyle choices and judgements about others that reiterate and entrench existing norms of racial separateness. While it might be unsurprising that 51 percent of whites surveyed agreed that ‘despite abuses, apartheid ideas were good ones’, it is striking that 35.5 percent of Africans, 34 percent of Coloureds and 42 percent of Indians thought likewise. According to the survey, several of the markers of a strong sense of racial distance are more prominent among Africans than whites. For example, 56 percent of Africans, 33.4 percent of whites, 26.6 percent of Coloureds and 41.6

What's in a name? Racial categorisations under apartheid and their afterlife

The legacy of the 1940s apartheid and influx control strategy in the 1950s struggles over influx control legislation the practical effects of influx control influx control and urban labour markets the workings of the labour bureaux influx control and African urbanization the shift into apartheid's second phase, 1959-1961.

The making of apartheid, 1948-1961 : conflict and compromise

In 2007, Smuts Ngonyama, then leading spokesperson for the South African government and the ANC, triggered a public controversy by proclaiming, ‘I didn't join the struggle to be poor’: a frank conjunction of liberation with wealth and what it can buy. For all the vociferous critique of Ngonyama, there are many whose life trajectories seem to underwrite his position. This article reflects on some of the historical antecedents of this version of freedom, arguing for an historically constitutive relationship between the regulation of race in South Africa and the regulation of consumption.

Races to consume: revisiting South Africa's history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom

Unexpectedly, sexuality has become one of the principal sites of contestation in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper demonstrates and accounts for the politicization of sex and sexuality in South Africa since 1994. The first part examines the discursive constitution of sexuality and the ways in which this has been informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid social order. Drawing on this discussion, the second part proposes a reading of the notorious HIV/AIDS controversy, which drew President Mbeki directly into the political fray. The paper argues that the controversy, although immediately concerned with the science and treatment of HIV/AIDS, is also a struggle over the discursive constitution of sexuality, in a form which dramatizes the ways in which recently contentious struggles over the manner of sexuality are enmeshed in the politics of ‘nation-building’, and the inflections of race, class and generation within it.

Deborah Posel

Papers

Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa

What's in a name? Racial categorisations under apartheid and their afterlife

The making of apartheid, 1948-1961 : conflict and compromise

Races to consume: revisiting South Africa's history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom

Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post-Apartheid South Africa