Essays
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After Labor
Wage work, it is said, is disappearing in the “new” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why,where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the foreseeable future.
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Thinking on borrowed time…about privileging the human
It is possible to detect a sense of foreboding in the vibrant, engaging papers assembled here, an ominous sense of dread as the birds fly off and calamity seems imminent. First written for a conference in the spring of 2017, they convey a mood one might term post-millennial, a consciousness of endings and uncertainties –…
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Dependence
In one form or another, the concept of dependence has, from the first, been foundational to modern understandings of humanity, society, and economy. For liberal theorists, individual freedom stemmed from a natural right to property that “owed nothing to society;” those without proprietorship of person and possessions were reduced to a dehumanized “dependance on the…
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Afterword: Uncanny Modernities, Early and Late
As these lively essays attest, the modern self has always been open to spiritual doubles, to others of one kind or another, to ghostly presences that seem uncannily at home amidst the intimate reaches of ordinary existence, notwithstanding the norms of liberal individualism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016:125). This fact has become ever more overtly acknowledged…
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Uncanny Returns
Liberal modern personhood presumes a coherent, indivisible subject. Yet there is plentiful evidence to suggest that selfhood in modern times is often experienced as inchoate: as split, doubled, even overtaken by the haunting presence of intimate others, benevolent or benign. Steeling the individual against instability and fracture has been the enduring task of the grand…
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Vigilantism And The Paradoxes Of Sovereignty
In October 2015, Lubabalo Vellem was arrested in Masiphumelele,1 a townshrlip of some 40,000 people some twenty-five miles south of Cape Town. Many of its residents are migrants from elsewhere in the country or the African continent at large. Vellem, aged 35, was accused of instigating “mob justice” in the wake of what was taken…
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The Dis/Appearing Body of Labor in Modern
The Laboring Body The laboring body is a curious thing: in the modern sense of homo faber, it connotes the psycho-physical activity through which human beings produce their modes of life, and in doing so, produce themselves as substantial sensuous, value producing beings. If, in Western thought, the capacity for mindful work sets humankind apart…
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Ethnicity, Inc.
In October 2000, Business Day, a leading South African newspaper, published an extraordinary story. Its title read: Traditional Leaders Form Private Firm for Investment.1 Contralesa, the Congress of Traditional Leaders, is the voice of ethnicity in this postcolony. It speaks for culture, customary law, and the collective rights of indigenous peoples. Also for the authority…
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Figuring Democracy
12.01 a.m., 25 April 1994. Wale Street, Cape Town, South Africa: The last strains of the anthem of the ancien regime – part requiem, part death- rattle – drift off into the night. A local choir, carefully rehearsed for the occasion, begins to belt out the new national song, with its familiar, once- banned libretto…
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Foreward: Everyday State and Democracy in Africa
Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters, notable for both its timeliness and breadth of vision, mobilizes the distinctive, decentering perspectives of ethnography to capture the living practices, the everyday vernaculars, of the state and democracy in contemporary Africa. It exemplifies the turn in African studies—perhaps, more accurately, return—to treating these phenomena, in the…
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The Wealth of Ethno-nations
The significance of ethnicity – of ethnicity understood as a foundational basis for forging selfhood and collective identity, feelings of primal attachment and shared affect, political claims to rights and the protection of interests, even for national belonging – has grown visibly over the past few decades. Needless to say, the phenomenon itself is hardly…
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Theory from the South
There appears to be a growing echo, slowly reverberating around the world, that, for good, ill, or both, Africa is the future, a harbinger of Europe’s history-to-come. Experts may debate the reasons for this: among them, a significant population bulge heavily skewed toward youth; an urban “revolution” unique in the current era; burgeoning consumer markets,…
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Reflections on Youth, From the Past to the Postcolony
PROLEGOMENON …philosophy does not concern itself with children. It leaves them to pedagogy, where they’re not in very good hands. Philosophy has forgotten about children. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader, p.141 There has long been a tendency in the public discourse of the West to speak of youth as a transhistorical, transcultural category. As if it…
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Privatizing the Millennium
The first is from post-apartheid South Africa. The New Life Church in Mafikeng-Mmabatho, capital of the North West Province, was established just before the fall of apartheid. It typifies a brand of upbeat, technically-hyped Pentecostalism that aspires to fill the moral void left by a withering of revolutionary ideals and civic norms in the postcolony.…
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Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa
Christian evangelists were intimately involved in the colonial process in southern Africa. This essay distinguishes two dimensions of their historical role, each associated with a different form of power. In the domain of formal political processes, of the concrete exercise of power, the effect of the nonconformist mission to the Tswana, as elsewhere in Africa,…
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Ethnicity, Inc.
PROLOGUE: toward the ethnologist-future In October 2000, Business Day, a leading South African newspaper, published an extraordinary story. Its title read: Traditional Leaders Form Private Firm for Investment.1 Contralesa, the Congress of Traditional Leaders, is the voice of ethnicity in this postcolony. It speaks for culture, customary law, and the collective rights of indigenous peoples.…
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The Madman and the Migrant
At its broadest, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness among a South African Tswana people. On the basis of the imagery of two Tswana men – a “madman” institutionalized by the apartheid regime and a former migrant laborer – it examines the content of Tswana historical consciousness as expressed in vernacular cultural practices,…
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Alien-Nation
What might zombies have to do with the implosion of neoliberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century? What might they have to do with postcolonial, post revolutionary, nationalism? With labor history? With the “crisis” of the modernist nation state? Why are these spectral signifiers making an appearance in epidemic proportions in several parts…
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Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction
Consider the following four fragments, four notes from postcolonial South Africa. Each is drawn from the archaeology of the fantastic in this new global age: The first. In 1996, in a far north-eastern village, a baboon, taken to be a witch in disguise, was killed by “necklacing,” the infamous way in which collaborators were…
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Millennial Capitalism, Occult Economies, and the Crisis of Reproduction in South Africa
At its broadest, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness among a South African Tswana people. On the basis of the imagery of two Tswana men – a “madman” institutionalized by the apartheid regime and a former migrant laborer – it examines the content of Tswana historical consciousness as expressed in vernacular cultural practices,…