Entanglement

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Sarah Nuttall. Entanglement

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Entanglement is powerful and persuasive, passionate and perceptive. This is a major contribution to contemporary literary and cultural studies. While steeped in the rich particularities and trajectories of change in post-apartheid urban existence, it addresses the most urgent questions of global cultural and political formations.

Sarah Nuttall offers her readers new critical vocabularies with which to grasp the fictions of self-making, the politics and aesthetics of consumption, and the new and terrifying technologies of the sexualised body. Casting off the limited frameworks of postcolonial theory, Entanglement is concerned instead with a politics of the emergent in the Postcolony.

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Entanglement, as I use it in the chapters which follow, enables us to work with the idea that the more racial boundaries are erected and legislated the more we have to look for the transgressions without which everyday life for oppressor and oppressed would have been impossible. It helps us, too, to find a method of reading which is about a set of relations, some of them conscious but many of them unconscious, which occur between people who most of the time try to define themselves as different.

Entanglement, furthermore, returns us to a concept of the human where we do not necessarily expect to find it. It enables an interrogation, imperatively, of the counter-racist and the work of desegregation. Since the chapters which follow take up these issues from the vantage point of South Africa they enable a conversation with preoccupations in contemporary humanities scholarship elsewhere, and reveal aspects of what South Africa can contribute to global debates about identity, power and race. Entanglement provides a suggestive way to draw together these theoretical threads. It is an idea I draw on throughout the book, without underestimating, I hope, what makes people different, how they think they are different (even when they might not be), and how difference has a charged and volatile history in this country.

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