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CHAPTER 1

Entanglement

Since the political transition in 1994 South African literary and cultural criticism has bifurcated into two distinctive bodies of work. Two dominant responses have emerged, that is, in relation to the dynamics of political change in the country.

The first bifurcation is an idiom produced by critics both inside and outside the country, which could be characterised as neo-Marxist in inflection. Here, the dominant critical impulse has been to assert continuity with the past, producing a critique based on reiteration and return, and an argument in the name of that which has not changed in the country. Such critics employ categories of race, class, domination and resistance in much the same way as critics had done in the decade or so before. Thus, for example, Herman Wasserman and Shaun Jacobs (2003) acknowledge that ‘certain social configurations have started to shift’ but emphasise that the issues of hegemony, resistance and race that marked an earlier critical idiom need to remain at the centre of our critical investigations and that ‘the reaffirmation of the same identities that in the past were discriminated against require our ongoing critical recognition’. Barbara Harlow and David Attwell (2000, p 2) refer to South Africa as ‘a society whose underlying social relations or even attitudes remain substantially unchanged’. Yet, by the time they were writing, South Africa’s black middle class, for example, emerged for the first time as larger than its white middle class, a statistic which contests a stasis in the social structure of South Africa and suggests the emergence of new kinds of imaginaries and practices in the country. Certainly, by the late 1990s neither recent South African fiction nor popular culture suggested social stasis.

Such readings were, to be sure, born in part of what we could refer to as an ethical oppositionality which seeks to register the ongoing ‘agony of the social’ – the continuing inequalities and suffering of many in South Africa since its political transition. This position resonated with a body of work produced during this period by a number of largely ex-South African critics based in the United States and Britain – even while these critics pushed its critical registers somewhat further. In a 2004 special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled ‘After the Thrill is Gone’ and edited by Rita Barnard and Grant Farred, readings of the contemporary South African moment by Neil Lazarus, Grant Farred, Shaun Irlam and others constituted what we could call a narrative of political loss or melancholia.

Loss is expressed in various idioms, chief amongst which is the loss of politics itself – or at least a form of resistance based on mass politics. Thus Neil Lazarus argues that the idea that South Africa is a nation at all is the perpetration of a violence; Grant Farred invokes a disgruntled, historically-enfranchised white subject and a discontented black subject and looks for an oppositional place, the zone of what he calls the ‘not yet political’; while Shaun Irlam finds that ‘the New South Africa has ushered in an era of identity mongering and separate development on a scale that South Africa’s old bosses incessantly promoted at an ideological level’. Grant Farred’s work, in particular, relies on that of Carl Schmitt. Politics, for Schmitt, involves friends and enemies, which means at the very least the centrality of those who are with you and those against whom you struggle. People will, according to Schmitt, only be responsible for who they are if the reality of death and conflict remain present.

This, then, constitutes the first critical moment adopted by literary scholars in response to the demise of apartheid and to its aftermath – a political and critical mode which I have characterised as one of reiteration and return. A second critical moment approaches the prognostics of change in terms of a representational shift, according to a more future-inflected politics. In order to approach an as yet nameless present, scholars have tried to propose and shape expanded critical vocabularies. Among them are Leon de Kock, who argues for a notion of ‘the seam’ (an idea he draws from Noel Mostert’s book Frontiers) to denote the place where difference and sameness are hitched together – where they are brought to self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms; Michael Titlestad, who, analysing jazz representation in literature and reportage, concerns himself with forms of epistemological itinerancy, with ‘transverse drifts through a set of theoretical possibilities’; Mark Sanders’s notion of complicity as marking the limits of a theory of ‘apartness’ and Isabel Hofmeyr, whose interest is in tracking the ‘post-resistance’ formations which traverse neo-Marxist and nationalist accounts of literary and cultural work in this country.

Precursors of these critical positions include my argument with Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000), that South African studies have, for a long time, been overdetermined by the reality of apartheid – as if, in the historical trajectory of the country, apartheid was inevitable in terms of both its origins and its consequences; as if everything led to it and everything flows as a consequence of it. We worked from the idea that other historical possibilities were out there, and are evolving now, in the aftermath of that oppressive system. That there are continuities between the apartheid past and the present we fully acknowledged. Apartheid social engineering did and still does work to fix spaces that are difficult to break down in the present. There is no question about this. But, we contended, there are also enough configurations in various spheres of contemporary South African life to warrant new kinds of explorations and tools of analysis. To confine these configurations to a lens of ‘difference’ embedded squarely in the apartheid past misses the complexity and contemporaneity of their formations.

Jolly and Attridge (1998) have argued for a syncretic analytical practice, suggesting that the problem lies in ‘our fixation on difference’, in its ‘fetishization’ (p 3) Likewise, Elleke Boehmer (1998) has shown that cultural form was used ‘as a front for other kinds of communication – for political imperatives, for the telling of history, for informing the world about apartheid’, with the result that it has been shaped by circumstance, rather than actively doing the work of shaping its material; that it is hesitant about what Boehmer calls ‘form-giving’ (p 53). Rita Barnard, in her work on South African literature, has long displayed an interest in ‘new possibilities of transcending the Manichean opposition of coloniser and colonised and of moving towards a new culturally-hybrid democracy’ (2006).

Critics working within the second moment outlined above have worked in large part with the historical archive. This is important since a theory of the present requires that we work out how we relate to the past and its remainders. Besides, these critics work in such a way that we can draw on their theoretical paradigms in the present. Nevertheless, what we need now is a critical approach which can draw present and past more fully together within a compelling analytical lens. Our critical archive, in other words, remains somewhat bifurcated in this temporal sense. In what follows I try to elaborate on the notion of entanglement, which I broached in the Introduction, as it might apply to specific instances in the historical and contemporary South African archive.

Entanglement, as I use the term here, is intended less to imply that we contest that forms of separation and difference do still occur, materially and epistemologically, than to draw into our analyses critical attention to those sites and spaces in which what was once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. There are several ways of doing this. One of these is to revisit, in the aftermath of official segregation, the concept of segregated space in socio-historical terms and use this as a methodological device for reading the post-apartheid situation; the second is to undertake a sustained reading of the present, or the ‘now’, as I have referred to it here, in order to supersede interpretative models based on configurations of the past. In what follows I try to draw on both analytic possibilities.

This chapter consists of three parts – fragments, possible registers, or, as I will indicate, methods of reading – as a way of approaching the issues set out above. The first part considers how a theory of entanglement might draw on aspects of a rich body of international work on creolité to raise important questions seldom asked of the South African cultural archive. The second considers regional variations in how we might approach such a body of work locally, and the third looks at conceptions of race and class in the light of the foregoing analysis. The chapter concludes by considering a series of inflections we might give to a notion of entanglement based on the material considered, and on the ways in which entanglement speaks to the work of desegregation, both as theoretical undertaking and as political praxis.

On creolisation

One of my interests in reading the ‘now’ in South Africa has been to consider how scholarly work done elsewhere on creolité might be deployed in the context of contemporary South Africa, specifically in relation to how to come to terms with a legacy of violence in a society based on inequality. The assumption, made most often by Marxist critics, has been that processes of creolisation are devoid of conflict – in other words, that these processes are not grounded in materialities and therefore that the use of the term as a theoretical tool results in the sidelining of the more crucial issues of class struggles, social hierarchies and inequalities.

In the context of South Africa theorists have tended to be uncomfortable with debates about creolisation. Two of the major reasons for this have been, first, the presupposition that ‘creolisation’ is tantamount to ‘colouredness’ as a biological and cultural construct and second, the apartheid state’s construction of colouredness as a political buffer between blacks and whites, and the interpellation of ‘colouredness’ as neither black nor white (according to an ideology of racial purity), a notion that was both racist and suspect.

Zoë Wicomb (1998), Zimitri Erasmus (2001) and Desirée Lewis (2001) have all written about ‘colouredness’ as having been constructed and experienced as a residual, supplementary identity ‘in-between’ whiteness and blackness and interpellated in relation to registers of respectability and (sexualised) shame. Erasmus, in the introduction to her edited collection Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, argues, however, that ‘colouredness must be understood as a creolised cultural identity’. Coloured identities are distinguished not merely by the fact of borrowing per se, she argues, ‘but by cultural borrowing and creation under very specific conditions of creolisation’ (p 16). For Erasmus creolisation refers to ‘cultural creativity under conditions of marginality’ and she draws on Edouard Glissant’s notion of ‘entanglement’ to elucidate her use of the term. In particular she makes use of Glissant’s notion that diversion – turning away from the pain and difficulty of creolised beginnings – needs to be complemented by reversion – a return to the point of entanglement, the point of difficulty (p 24).

It seems to me that a ‘creolité hypothesis’ might be applied to aspects of the South African cultural archive proposed as one set of questions among others in relation to the shaping of racial and cultural identity in South Africa and might offer a programme of possibility in relation to neglected questions, a point of interrogation directed towards a richly complex and extremely conflictual history. What many critics of the concept of ‘creolisation’ tend to overlook is precisely that the notion was born out of the historical experience of slavery and its aftermath.

In his pioneering study Singing the Master (1992) Roger Abrahams shows how the emergence of a typically African-American vernacular culture was the result of a dual legacy, a syncretic formation that was itself part of the events that brought together slave and master in the plantations of the Americas. Focusing on slave dancing practices Abrahams examines a context in which planters encouraged the display of what they recognised to be slaves’ ‘different set[s] of cultural practices’, while slaves came to recognise in the obligatory play and performance ‘an opportunity for cultural invention and social commentary’. Abrahams’s overwhelming impression of life on the plantation, he writes, is ‘that the representations of two cultures lived cheek to jowl for a matter of centuries, entertaining each other, subtly imitating each other in selective ways, but never fully comprehending the extent and meaning of these differences’ (p xxiv).

It goes without saying that this coming together happens in a context of a deep loss: loss of a home, loss of rights and political status, and overall terror (Hartman 1997). When considered historically, then, creolisation relates to the worst that society is capable of – the maintenance of human beings in the shadow of life and death. Yet even within this most violent of systems (and possibly because of it, where violence itself gives rise to the fractures and cracks that let the other in) cultural traffic occurs – mutual mimicries, mutabilities. The notion itself, therefore, does not foreclose possibilities of resistance, nor does it deny the material fact of subjection. It signals a register of actions and performances that may be embodied in a multiplicity of repertoires. In this sense creolisation is, first and foremost, a practice.

Although Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2002), in his work on creolisation, treats historical situations which come from the Caribbean slave plantation, he writes that ‘this treatment may be useful to historically oriented cultural anthropologists and linguists in general, inasmuch as it directly faces the issue of our management of the historical record’¹ (p 190). For the majority of enslaved Africans and African Americans prior to the mid-nineteenth century, creolisation did not happen away from the plantation system but within it, writes Trouillot. This creation was possible because slaves found fertile ground in the interstices of the system, in the latitude provided by the inherent contradictions between the system and specific plantations. On some plantations, Trouillot shows, slaves were allowed to grow their own food and, at times, to sell portions of what they harvested. This practice was instituted by owners to enhance their own profits, since they did not have to pay for the slaves’ food. Eventually, however, these practices, which at first emerged because they provided concrete advantages to particular owners, went against the logic of the plantation system. Time used on the provision grounds was also slave-controlled time to a large extent. It was time to ‘create culture’ knowingly or unknowingly ... Time indeed to develop modes of thought and codes of behavior that were to survive plantation slavery itself (p 203). Trouillot writes about social time and social space seized within the system and turned against it; about the ability to stretch margins and circumvent borderlines which lay at the heart of African American cultural practices in the New World.

If slavery and the creolisation it produced were crucial to early modernity they were also central to the formation of diasporic communities. The articulation of race to space and motion is an integral part of even recent Marxist-inflected readings of early modern forms of racial identity-making. Some of these readings focus on the intercultural and transnational formations of the Atlantic world (Gilroy 1993; Linebaugh & Rediker 2000). This Atlantic world is peopled by workers: sailors, pirates, commoners, prostitutes, strikers, insurrectionists. Here, the sea is not a frontier one crosses, it is a shifting space between fixed places which it connects. This is a geography of worldliness, which could be opposed to the geographies of particularism and nationalism.

It is worth noting here how relatively few theorists have explored these geographies, although the work of John Thompson (1992), Veit Erlmann (1991) and Rob Nixon (1994) has been important in this regard. One critique of these readings is that South Africa, or the Cape at least, in fact looked to the Indian Ocean, as Robert Shell (1994) and Patrick Harries (2000) have suggested and which my own work with Françoise Vergès and Abdoumaliq Simone (2004) has explored.² Given its tri-centric location between the Indian and Atlantic worlds as well as the land mass of the African interior, further readings of this space from an outer-national vantage point is likely to reinforce a creolité hypothesis.

Trouillot and others provide a reading of creolisation firmly located within paradigms of violence and mobility, spatiality and circulation, and it must also be on such terms, though with its own historical specificities, that any use of the notion in South Africa could be made.

South Africa can be characterised as a country born out of processes of mobility, the boundaries of which have constantly been reinvented over time, through war, dislocation and dispossession (the Mfecane, European colonialism, the Great Trek and labour migrancy, for instance). A multiplicity of forms of subjugation has emerged as a result of this, not all of which are class based. Here we might refer to the Mfecane as a series of violent encounters leading to lines of exchange and fusion; or to the mutual borrowings in the realm of domesticity between ‘servant’ and ‘mistress’ (of which Judith Coullie, in her book The Closest of Strangers (2004, p 2) remarks ‘…notwithstanding this utter separateness (and even somehow enabled by it), it was common for women to experience long-term mutual dependencies … the relationship was indeed the very closest, though the strict limits of intimacy … were rarely breached’)³; or to long-distance lines of connection in the mines between workers from South Africa and those who come from elsewhere on the continent and beyond, a transcontinental mixing which shaped worker identities and ideologies in South Africa in ways that have yet to be written about, although Harries (1994) and Coplan (1994) have begun this work, if still within circumscribed geographical limits.

Deborah Posel (2001) has pointed in her work to the vagaries of racial definition on which the apartheid state relied – a ‘common sense’ approach to who belonged to which race, based firmly within the materialities of everyday life. Rather than strict legal definitions, apartheid enforcers relied on such measures as the infamous pencil test, the idea that someone’s race was to be decided according to ‘what was generally accepted’ [as white or black or coloured] or ‘the environment and dress of the person concerned’ (pp 102-5). These ‘common sense’ definitions were then fixed and bureaucratised by the state. They were also definitions which, once the apartheid straitjacket was broken, appear to have remained internalised. Yet how people actually thought about themselves, and the interstitial manoeuvres they were able to make within this ‘common sense’ bureaucracy of race, remain to be researched in a properly microscopic way.

There is, perhaps, a further point to be made here, and that is in relation to the work of cultural theory itself. While social scientists seek a view of the social ‘whole’ and thus often repeat the apartheid metanarrative or prism of race in their interpretation of the social, cultural theory finds itself freer to ask questions left unasked, to inhabit zones, even of the past, that refute the master trope and give life to interstitial narratives that speak to the whole in defamiliarising ways.

Any deployment of aspects of the work on creolité coming from scholars such as Trouillot, Gilroy, and Linebaugh and Rediker would need to involve readings hardly yet undertaken of South Africa’s relationship to other spaces, aiming to open South Africa’s readings of itself to new boundaries. As I have emphasised above, in general the resources of such a hypothesis can only be put to work if the term is given a particular inflection, and that is its violence. Indeed, given a properly historical reading, both in South Africa and elsewhere, creolisation carries with it a particularly vivid sense (compared to, say, notions of hybridity and syncretism) of the cruelty that processes of mixing have involved.

While we have, to date, undertaken few readings of the intimacies, across race and class, that have long characterised a deeply segregated society – that is, the often unexpected points of intersection and practical knowledge of the other wrought from a common, though often mutually coercive and confrontational experience – we might equally remark, using the South African case as a powerful moment in a wider global history of race, that intimacy does not necessarily exclude violation. Intimacy is not always a happy process. On the contrary, it may often be another name for tyranny. This all being said, my own intellectual preoccupation is less with the term ‘creolisation’ than with a way of thinking, a method of reading, the possibility of a different cartography.

Regional variations

In the light of the available historical and ethnographic material it might be argued that such a method of reading relies on the history of the Cape. Although this may be so, such an approach can be usefully applied to other regions of the country. Consider, for example, the density of the circulation of workers through urban sites of production in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Southern, Central and Eastern Africa over centuries. Consider, too, the transnational cultures of the mines, of which we still know so little. Do we believe that there was no cross-cultural interaction; that South Africans took nothing from other African migrant workers in inventing an urban vernacular culture they now claim as their own? Or that the Indian presence in Natal had no influence on ways of being black, or white? As for the political culture of the Bantustans, it surely cannot be unearthed without mapping the imitations by local potentates of their white masters’ culture of power. Conversely, the practices of apartheid tyrants cannot be grasped without paying attention to the various ways in which they subtly mimicked, in selective ways, their victims, while at the same time denying their common humanity.

More substantial, though, is the evidence already gathered, by historians in particular, about the flexibility of racial boundaries on the Witwatersrand in the years directly preceding apartheid. Jon Hyslop (1995), in his work on white working-class women and the invention of apartheid, shows how the newfound independence of the Afrikaner female working class on the Rand threatened patriarchal relations in white society, and how Nationalist government hysteria about ‘mixed marriages’ played an important role in re-establishing gender hierarchies. In urban slums Afrikaans-speaking poor whites were frequently not demonstrating the instinctive aversion, socially or sexually, to racial mixing proclaimed by government racial ideology. Hyslop shows that these whites would by no means automatically identify as ‘Afrikaners’ so allegiance to Afrikaner nationalism had constantly to be created (see also Van Onselen 1982).

One of the most distinctive features of Johannesburg’s built environment in the inter-war years was the existence of a large belt of slums that spread from the western suburbs across the city centre to the suburbs in the east. Eddie Koch’s work (1983) shows how resistance to the clearance of the slums gave rise to a series of conflicts and tensions which delayed the implementation of segregation and allowed the culture of the slum yards to grow and thrive.

The extent of the permeability of racial boundaries at this time again reveals the amount of work it took to put and keep apartheid in place. The degree to which rural paternalism contained egalitarian elements has been debated in relation to Van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine (1996). Interesting, too, in this context is the existence of hybrid border communities: John Dunn’s people, and Coenraad de Buys and his descendants, the Griquas, in particular, symbolise what Mostert (1993, p 237) calls ‘a lost route of Afrikaner history’. Of De Buys Mostert writes: ‘on the one hand he represented the interracial intimacy and familiarity, on the other the ruthless self-interest, peremptory will and desire and brutality, of relations between those forerunning Boers and the indigenous inhabitants’ (p 238).

George Frederickson, in his book White Supremacy (1981), suggests that the Cape really was different. He shows that the main external source of attitudes to race mixture in the early Cape Colony was the precedents deriving from the Dutch experience in Indonesia, where the trend was to encourage intermarriage in an effort to superimpose on the native social order a new caste of Dutch Christians. The Dutch, not particularly committed to racial purity, preferred to legalise Dutch-speaking Christianised ‘mixed-race’ people, though the British would later try to impose a clearer basis of stratification on what they saw as this racial chaos. Frederickson argues in his comparative study that it is, in fact, the United States, not South Africa, in which historically-white supremacists enjoyed the luxury of a racial exclusiveness that is unparalleled in the annals of racial inequality (p 135).

The work of Vivian Bickford-Smith et al (1999) on Cape Town’s history has tended to de-romanticise the city’s story but still contains much material suggesting that Cape Town was much less racially bounded than other areas of South Africa. But the point I am pursuing here has less to do with the porousness or otherwise of racial boundaries than with the idea that the more such boundaries are erected and legislated the more the observer has to look for the petty transgressions without which everyday life for both the ‘master’ and the ‘slave’ would be impossible. Racial segregation, that is, can only work if, somewhere else, the entanglements, denied precisely to safeguard the official fiction, are also taking place.

The larger question is, therefore, how to find a method of reading the social which is about mutual entanglements, some of them conscious but most of them unconscious, which occur between people who most of the time try to define themselves as different. The more they try to do this the more the critic must be suspicious of their talk of uniqueness and difference. Such claims, we might well suggest, repress, at least at times, precisely what draws together, what links, the oppressor and the oppressed, black, white and coloured. In respect of all the above, then, it would not make sense to confine our understanding of creolité to the Cape past.⁴

Race and class

Once we take on board a way of reading which is based on mutual entanglements we are obliged to think of race, class and power differently. In particular, we have to confront what it is that older paradigms are not able to show us. Beginning with race we might first note that the South African academy and beyond has produced many examples of carefully argued work on race and power in this country. Moreover, there is a self-awareness, from within these very traditions, of the limits of dominant approaches (see Hamilton 1997 and Hyslop 2002a&b).

In asking how to locate the ‘now’, the contemporary, in South Africa, we have to ask the question when and how race matters. Here we might reflect on the fact that race appears to be hardening in the public political realm precisely as legalised racism has been abolished. One early example of this was the public correspondence between South African President Thabo Mbeki and the leader of the Opposition, Tony Leon, in 2000. Mbeki accused Leon of publishing ‘hysterical estimates’ of HIV/Aids sufferers in South Africa and of ‘making wild and insulting claims’, along with the international community, about the African origins of HIV. Leon averred that it was ‘a fundamental mistake and profoundly misguided to associate matters of race with the Aids crisis’ and accused Mbeki of using ‘tactics of moral blackmail or demonisation’.⁵ Since 1994, moreover, what used to be called ‘non-racialism’ is seldom heard in political discourse. This silence is closely related to the fact that while under apartheid racial discrimination was crucial to the twin issues of work and wealth, in the post-apartheid period the politics of black empowerment plays an important role in shifting institutional power politics.

This hardening is taking place at the same time as more choices are becoming available in terms of racial identification, especially in the sphere of culture. The pragmatics of a ‘cross-over culture’ are now expressed through other vehicles, in particular through powerful new media cultures and the market (see Nuttall 2004). There is, as yet, only the beginning of new work and theorisation of these ‘post-racist’ configurations which reinvigorate the political utopias of these terms. Extraordinary ethnographies are emerging from scholars such as Nadine Dolby (2001), Tanya Farber (2002) and Mpolokeng Bogatsu (2003).

In relation to studies of class in South Africa emphasis has been oriented towards the working class, while fewer studies have focused on peasant or rural culture or, one might add, on middle-class migrant and city cultures.⁶ How can we re-imagine its usages? Where is class located? If popular culture increasingly replaces neighbourhood and family as dominant sites for the making of identity, how class-bound is it? As I show in my work on Y or loxion culture (2004) remarkably similar processes of identity-making, especially in the realm of popular culture, emerge between ‘working’ and ‘lower middle-class’ school children in Durban and ‘middle-class’ teenagers in Johannesburg. What kinds of imperfect meshings occur between the micro and the macro, the complexity of people’s lives and the sometimes abstract and general categories we use to describe them? How do technological change, new forms of power, demographic upheavals, urban growth, challenge to stable identities, bureaucratic expansion and deepening market relations affect the making of social lives and the construction and deployment of class identities?

Tim Burke’s (1996) work suggests that class – perhaps not class formations exactly, but relations of economic and social power – needs to be thought about far less mechanistically than it has been to date. In his study of commodity culture in Zimbabwe Burke shows the complexity of ‘proletarianisation’ in a colonial context, and even of the day-to-day living out of poverty and privilege. Questions of class will need to be posed in a context in which not only has South Africa changed, so has capitalism.

Jean and John Comaroff’s (2001) work on ‘millennial capitalism’ suggests that the new South African nation state is not only new in itself but operates in a new world: it must achieve modernity in a post-modern world and a world of ‘casino capitalism’. This is an historically new situation, both internally and internationally. Production as it was known before is increasingly being replaced by provision of services and the capacity to control space, time and the flow of money through speculation. Speculation is not only practised by the middle classes: poor people, too, frequently participate in high-risk investments such as the lottery. In higher echelons, dealing in stocks and bonds whose rise and fall is governed by chance results in new cultures of circulation – the culturally inflected paths along which objects, people and ideas move

All this points to new temporalities or velocities of the social. James Campbell (2002) has written how, given South Africa’s elaborate tradition of labour repression, scholars have focused their attention on production, leaving consumption as something of an ‘historical orphan’.

South African theorists have yet to give an adequate account of these new configurations of the political economy of culture. For this reason it is more important than ever to pay attention to those archives still at times undervalued and, in any case, under-written by historians and anthropologists in South Africa. As Chapter Two will show, one of these archives is that of the city – and the literary – itself.

Above I have considered the analytic resources of an Anglicised and Africanised form of creolisation for a theory of entanglement. In doing so, I have aimed to de-familiarise some of the more routine readings of South African culture. This may not in itself strike the reader as a useful approach. But given the political evidence of substantial change in this country it seems more than apposite to revisit our analytic barometers and yardsticks to find out where they require active redefinition.

* * * * * * *

The force-line of this chapter has been the notion of theorising the now. The theoretical parameters I sought are grounded in the realities of conflict, violence, social hierarchy and inequality. They take account too, however, of the making of race identity in terms of cultural traffic – mutabilities within a system of violence which acknowledge the material fact of subjection and registers of action and performance embedded in processes of mobility and lines of exchange. In the preceding pages I have been interested in pursuing the entanglements that occur precisely within contexts of racial segregation and its aftermath, transgressions of the racial order which may take various syncretic forms, at times including a certain racial porousness. I have sought to offer a method of reading the social through the mutual entanglements between people who, most of the time, might define themselves as different, and which receive little attention from those who study them.

A theory of entanglement can be linked in important ways to a notion of desegregation. One could argue that the system of racial segregation in the political, social and cultural structure of the country paradoxically led to forms of knowledge production and cultural critique that mirrored, if only metaphorically, the sociopolitical structure, provoking, ultimately, a form of segregated theory. Segregated theory is theory premised on categories of race difference, oppression versus resistance, and perpetrators versus victims – master dualisms which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission magnified, and aimed, in the longer term, to end.

This was an intricate and often local process which also intersected with, and was influenced by, studies in postcolonial theory which placed a great deal of emphasis on difference. Difference was invoked as a political resource in struggles against imperial drives to homogenise and universalise identity and politics. Difference, then, was a strategic tool against imperial definitions of the universal, and an attempt by those who were the subjugated subjects of imperial rule to maintain an authenticity from which they could articulate claims to selfhood.

After 1994 a space opened up for critical theory to develop ways of reading the contemporary that no longer relied wholly on ‘segregated theory’. After living – and thinking – within a system of legislated difference for so long, that is, it became possible to rethink the absoluteness of difference as a theoretical category and, by extension, the assumption that a lens of difference must be assumed to be essential to any post-colonial project. This is despite the fact that many studies of South African culture after 1994 have dispensed with notions of the inter-racial imaginary and the limits of apartness.

The focus in recent decades, both in South Africa and internationally, has been on the black subject and the white subject as more or less discrete objects of study, and work that focuses on points of connections or similarities or affinities between people, hardly exists. The work of cultural theory remains crucially tied to the work of redress, and the desegregations explored here depend for their ethical weight on the multiple material desegregations which must ensue from this kind of theorising. Such work must necessarily be open to the shifting formations of the present even as racism continues and even when, as Gilroy (2004, p 131) remarks, ‘the crude, dualistic architecture of racial discourse stubbornly militates against their appearance’. It is to these formations that our critical judgement must necessarily be alive.