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.

Hazel Carby, Yale University, New Haven

Sarah Nuttall’s book is a welcome addition to South African literary and

cultural studies, taking us in new directions beyond the apartheid and
even standard post-apartheid models. Moving through a variety of settings
and moments both textual and non-textual, it is prepared to take risks in
matters ranging from the ‘citiness’ of Johannesburg, to the recombinatory
qualities of style, to the larger implications of violence in South Africa.
Sometimes provocative, always thoughtful, never less than deeply engaged,
and ultimately quite personal, its series of explorations allow Nuttall to
shed the light of her lively intelligence on some of the intriguing, troubling,
energising, and always complex manifestations of what will now come
under her definition of ‘entanglement’ in an evolving South African world.

Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

i
 Other books edited or co-edited by Sarah Nuttall

Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History

in South Africa and Australia (Routledge, 1996)

Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory

in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies

(Oxford University Press, 2000)

Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics

(Duke University Press/ Kwela Books, 2006)

At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa

(Jonathan Ball, 2007)

Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis

(Duke University Press/Wits University Press, 2008)

The manuscript for this book, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural

Reflections on Post-Apartheid, won the University of the Witwatersrand
Research Committee Publication Award in 2008.

ii
Entanglement
Entanglement
Literary and cultural reflections
on post-apartheid

Sarah Nuttall

iii
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
http://witspress.wits.ac.za

Copyright © Sarah Nuttall 2009

First published 2009

ISBN:978-1-86814-476-1

Earlier versions of chapters in this book have appeared in the following

publications: ‘Entanglement’ as ‘City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South
Africa’ in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2004), ‘Literary City’
in Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and
Achille Mbembe (2008), ‘Secrets and Lies’ as ‘Subjectivities of Whiteness’
in African Studies Review (2001), Self-Styling as ‘Stylizing the Self: The Y
Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg’ in Public Culture (2004) and ‘Girl
Bodies’ in Social Text (2004).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publisher and the copyright holder.

Cover image adapted from the painting Lasso by Penny Siopis, 2007.

Edited by Pat Tucker

Indexed by Margaret Ramsay
Cover design and typesetting by Crazy Cat Designs
Printing and binding by Paarl Print

iv
Entanglement
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Entanglement 17

2 Literary City 33

3 Secrets and Lies 58

4 Surface and Underneath 83

5 Self-Styling 108

6 Girl Bodies 132

Conclusion 151

Notes 161

Bibliography 175

Index 192

v
Acknowledgements

Frequently, in the writing of a book, a small

group of people become one’s interlocutors.
Those people have been Isabel Hofmeyr, Cheryl-
Ann Michael, Rita Barnard and Achille Mbembe.
My thanks go to Isabel for understanding from
the start what I was trying to do, and edging me
closer to it; Cheryl-Ann, for being my best and
sternest critic; Rita, for her suggestions and
support; and Achille, for always being willing
to talk through with me points of difficulty in
the making of my arguments. More than this, I
thank each of them for the inspiration I have
drawn from their own work, which is evident from
the writing that follows.
Then there is a second circle of people with
whom I have discussed my ideas, drawn from
theirs, and regarded as sounding boards and
shape shifters in my own thinking. These include
my colleagues at WISER, with whom, in the
deepest and most daily of ways, I have been in
conversation, agreement and disagreement.
Deborah Posel has made all of that possible by
imagining into being an intellectual space, WISER,
and by drawing together a group of people with

vii
Acknowledgements
whom I have been able to have interdisciplinary, provisional, at times heretical,
conversations. My years at WISER have given me room to try out ideas, to
experiment, to speak my mind and to feel at ease and supported by my
colleagues in a way that is hard to imagine to the same degree anywhere else.
I thank Deborah too for the inspiration of her own work. Jon Hyslop’s
work has been very important in helping me think through questions of
race, urban culture and the making of the present in relation to the past.
Irma du Plessis, Tom Odhiambo and Robert Muponde, through their
writing and their conversation, have caused me to constantly rethink the
way I see the world. Liz Gunner has inspired me in numerous ways,
including through her work, and Liz McGregor has taught me a great deal
about how to shape a more public voice for academic work. Ivor Chipkin, Liz
Walker, Marks Chabedi and Nthabiseng Motsemme shared my early years
at WISER and I am grateful to all of them for their insights and their writing.
Ashlee Neser, Michael Titlestad and Pamila Gupta are all hugely valued
colleagues with whom I can talk about anything I happen to be working
on. Lara Allen has been a close friend and a valuable intellectual
interlocutor. I am grateful to Graeme Reid and Julia Hornberger for their
writing, their humour, their comradeship.
Beyond WISER, I thank the following people, with all of whom I have
been in conversation during the years it has taken to produce this book:
Mark Sanders, Penny Siopis, Hazel Carby, Elleke Boehmer, Jean Comaroff,
John Comaroff, Mark Gevisser, Lindsay Bremner, Abdoumaliq Simone,
Carol Breckenridge, Arjun Appadurai, Rob Nixon, Vron Ware, Paul Gilroy,
Louise Bethlehem, Stefan Helgesson, Meg Samuelson, Ian Baucomb, Eric
Worby, Rehana Vally, Emmanuelle Gille, Tawana Kupe, David Goldberg,
Philomena Essed and David Attwell.
Finally, in a fourth circle, I thank people who have influenced me in
more implicit ways, sometimes in direct exchange, or though reading their
work, or simply through knowing them. They are Juan Obarrio, Livio
Sansone, Dominique Malaquais, Peter Geschiere, Ena Jansen, Jennifer
Wenzel, Annie Gagiano, David Bunn, Jane Taylor, Carolyn Hamilton, Dan
Ojwang, John Matshikiza, Njabulo Ndebele, Louise Meintjies, Karin Barber,
Michiel Heyns, Michelle Adler, Denise Newman, Colin Richards, Grace Musila,
Leon de Kock, Natasha Distiller, Pumla Gqola, Sue van Zyl, Khosi Xaba,
Justice Malala, and Fred Khumalo.

viii
Entanglement
 My PhD students, including Robert Muponde, Grace Khunou, the late
Phaswane Mpe, Kgamadi Kometsi, John Montgomery, Zethu Matebeni,
Cobi Labuschagne and Syned Mthatiwa, have been a pleasure to work
with, and it has been very meaningful to me to be contributing to producing
the next generation of young academics in South African universities. I
am very grateful to Veronica Klipp, Estelle Jobson and Melanie Pequeux
at Wits University Press for their openness, efficiency and generosity
during the months of this book’s production.
Circling outside the work of this book, but lodged deeply in my heart,
are Jean and Jolyon, James, Simone, Alice and Zoë.
Achille, Léa and Aniel occupy, like music, a place beyond words and are
my love.

ix
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Entanglement is a condition of being twisted

together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of
an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or
ignored or uninvited. It is a term which may
gesture towards a relationship or set of social
relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a
tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness.1
It works with difference and sameness but also
with their limits, their predicaments, their
moments of complication. It is a concept I find
deeply suggestive for the kinds of arguments I
want to make in relation to the post-apartheid
present, in particular its literary and cultural
formations. So often the story of post-apartheid
has been told within the register of difference –
frequently for good reason, but often, too, ignoring
the intricate overlaps that mark the present and,
at times, and in important ways, the past, as well.
Entanglement is an idea that has been explored
by scholars in anthropology, history, sociology and
literary studies, although always briefly and in
passing rather than as a structuring concept in
their work. I want to draw it from the wings and
place it where we can see it more clearly, and

1
Introduction
consider that it might speak with a tongue more fertile than we had
imagined, with nuances often uncaught or left latent in what may
constitute a critical underneath, or sub-terrain. In the South African
context which I will examine here, the term carries perhaps its most
profound possibilities in relation to race – racial entanglement – but it
brings with it, too, other registers, ways of being, modes of identity-making
and of material life.
Below I outline six ways in which the term has been interpreted, explicitly
or implicitly, by others. I spend some time on this, since these are complex
ideas, ideas which signal a number of important intellectual pathways
forged in recent years in African studies and beyond. Thereafter, I explain
how I think of the term, bringing to it my own inflections, and explaining
why it is an appropriate structuring idea for the book as a whole.
The first rubric under which the term has been used is in relation to a
process of historical entanglement. As early as 1957 the liberal historian,
C W de Kiewiet (1957), suggested that the deepest truth of South African
history, and one often elided by later historians, is that the more
dispossession occurred the more blacks and whites depended on each other.
There was an intricate entanglement on the earliest colonial frontiers:
accompanying whites’ search for land was the process of acquiring labour
and, in this process, whites became dependent on blacks, and blacks on
whites. Precisely as this dependency grew, so whites tried to preserve their
difference through ideology – racism. The implications of De Kiewiet’s
argument (p 48) that ‘the conflict of black and white was fed more by their
similarities than by their differences’ is that the emergence and articulation
of racial difference was, in this context, a symptom of loss (loss of
independence through increasing dependence on black labour) – but a loss
that most whites on the early frontier refused to embrace.
Much more recently, Carolyn Hamilton (1998) has argued that categories
and institutions forged under colonial rule should not be viewed as the
wholesale creation of white authorities but as the result of ‘the complex
historical entanglement of indigenous and colonial concepts’ (pp 3-4). By
focusing on how disparate concerns were drawn together and, over time,
became entangled, this approach enables us to elucidate the diverse and
shifting interests that fuelled colonial politics, and to reveal that it was
never simply about colonial subjugation and anti-colonial resistance.

2
Entanglement
Rather, it entailed the uneven mixing and reformulation of local and
imperial concerns. Lynn Thomas’s (2003) work is part of a growing
literature, mainly focused on medicine and domesticity, that analyses the
history of the body in Africa as a story of wide-ranging struggles over
wealth, health and power – and how such struggles connected and
combined the material and the moral, the indigenous and the imperial,
the intimate and the global. Thomas’s work on reproduction and the politics
of the womb in Kenya emphasises entanglement as against two earlier
approaches to the topic: the first, she shows, is the ‘breakdown of tradition’
approach, which sees colonialism as a clash of two radically different
worldviews, one African and one European, resulting in the ultimate
triumph of the latter (such arguments resonate with social scientific
theories of ‘modernisation’). The second emphasises the power of colonial
discourses and categories, largely at the expense of exploring the impact
of colonialism on its subjects, and the perspectives and experiences of
colonial subjects (pp 17-19).
Isabel Hofmeyr (2004), in her work on the history of the book, argues
that rigid distinctions between ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’ are increasingly
misleading. Unravelling the simplifying dualisms of ‘centre/periphery’ and
‘colonised/coloniser’ Hofmeyr weaves, instead, an imaginary structured
by circuits, layering, webs, overlapping fields and transnational networks.
Texts, like identities, do not, she argues (p 30), travel one way – from
centre to periphery, for instance – but in ‘bits and pieces’ and through
many media, transforming in many settings and places, and convening
numerous different publics at different points in what Appadurai (1986)
has referred to as their ‘social lives’.
Hofmeyr is interested in diasporic histories, moving between Africa, the
Caribbean, Europe and the United States, and her work constitutes a web
versus an avowedly national intellectual formation. Hofmeyr’s web,
carrying with it the notion of interlacing, an intricacy of pattern or
circumstance, a membrane that connects, is an entanglement of historical
space and time. If she looks at shared fields of discourse and exchange, at
‘intellectual convergences’ (p 17), she also considers the conditions under
which such formations are rejected, terminated or evaporate, becoming
‘meaningless or unintelligible’ (p 15). In this case, modes of translatability
and entanglement become short-lived, spectral.

3
Introduction
 The second major rubric invoking the term is temporal. Achille Mbembe
(2001, p 14) has written about the time of entanglement, arguing that, as
an age, the postcolony ‘encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities,
reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate
one another: an entanglement’. Mbembe argues that there is no way to
give a plausible account of the time of entanglement without asserting
three postulates: firstly, that this time is ‘not a series but an interlocking
of presents, pasts and futures that retain their depths of other presents,
pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous
ones’. Secondly, that it is made up of ‘disturbances, of a bundle of unforeseen
events’. Thirdly, that close attention to ‘its real patterns of ebbs and flows
shows that this time is not irreversible’ (and thus calls into question the
hypothesis of stability and rupture underpinning social theory) (p 16).
To focus on the time of entanglement, Mbembe shows, is to repudiate
not only linear models but the ignorance that they maintain and the
extremism to which they have repeatedly given rise. Research on Africa
has ‘assimilated all non-linearity to chaos’ and ‘underestimated the fact
that one characteristic of African societies over the long durée has been
that they follow a great variety of temporal trajectories and a wide range
of swings only reducible to an analysis in terms of convergent or divergent
evolution at the cost of an extraordinary impoverishment of reality’ (p 17)2.
Jennifer Wenzel’s work (2009) also contributes to a theory of
entanglement in its temporal dimensions. She traces the afterlives of anti-
colonial millenarian movements as they are revived and revised in later
nationalist struggles, with a particular focus on the Xhosa cattle-killing
in South Africa. In seeking to understand literary and cultural texts as
sites in which the unrealised visions of anti-colonial projects continue to
assert their power, she rethinks the notion of failure by working with
ideas of ‘unfailure’ to examine the tension between hope and despair,
the refusal ‘to forget what has never been’ of which these movements speak.
Wenzel explores ways of thinking about failure other than falsity,
fraudulence or finality – that is, in terms of historical logics other than
decisive failure as a dead end. Failure, she suggests, might involve a more
complex temporality, and the afterlife of failed prophecy might take forms
other than a representation of failure. It may be read, for instance, in
terms of a ‘utopian surplus’ that sees in failed prophecy unrealised

4
Entanglement
dreams that might aid in the imagining of contemporary desires for
liberation. Thus Wenzel proposes an ethics of retrospection that would
maintain a radical openness to the past and its visions of the future.
Literary scholars have attended to a rubric of entanglement in terms of
two formulations in particular: ideas of the seam, and of complicity. Leon
de Kock (2004) proposes that we read the South African cultural field
according to a configuration of ‘the seam’. He takes the notion of the ‘seam’
initially from Noel Mostert, author of Frontiers (1993), who writes that ‘if
there is a hemispheric seam to the world, between Occident and Orient,
then it must lie along the eastern seaboard of Africa’ (p xv). While the
seam remains embedded in the topos of the frontier, De Kock draws it into
his analysis to mark ‘the representational dimension of cross-border
contact’ (p 12). For De Kock the seam is the place where difference and
sameness are hitched together – where they are brought to self-awareness,
denied, or displaced into third terms: ‘a place of simultaneous convergence
and divergence, the seam is the paradox qualifying any attempt to imagine
organicism or unity’ (p 12).
De Kock gives a poststructuralist spin to Mostert’s historical account,
grounding its tropes within the discourse of postcolonial theory. He does
so to mount a reading of race and difference in South Africa – especially
the deconstruction of a system of white superiority as a political and
epistemological ground. The configuration of the seam remains, in his
reading, embedded in the idea of the frontier, as do contemporary race
relations in South Africa. Suggesting that the post-apartheid present is
engaged in an attempt to suppress difference, he professes an ‘ingrained
weariness’ with ‘unitary representation’ (p 20). It is striking that the
greatest subtlety of De Kock’s analysis is reserved for the past (such as
his reading of Sol Plaatje’s simulation of sameness within the colonial
project in order to achieve the objective of political equality, in a terrain
he well understood to be riven with difference), and his bibliography attests
to only a minimal engagement with the sources of the ‘now’. What De
Kock characterises as the recurrent ‘crisis of inscription’ that defines South
African writing, Michael Titlestad (2004a) wants to consider as improvising
at the seam. Titlestad writes about the ways in which jazz music and
reportage have been used in South Africa to construct identities that
diverge from the fixed subjectivities constructed in terms of apartheid

5
Introduction
fantasies of social hierarchy. Jazz, because of both its history and its
cultural associations, writes Titlestad, is persistently ‘a music at the
seam’ (p 111).
The theoretical import of the notion of ‘complicity’ as a means of
approaching the South African cultural archive has been given powerful
expression by Mark Sanders (2002). Sanders argues that apartheid and
its aftermath occasion the question of complicity, both in terms of glaring
instances of collaboration or accommodation – in which he is less interested
– and via a conception of resistance and collaboration as interrelated, as
problems worth exploring without either simply ‘accusing or excusing’ the
parties involved (p x). Sanders works from the premise that both apartheid’s
opponents and its dissenting adherents found themselves implicated in
its thinking and practices. He therefore argues that we cannot understand
apartheid and its aftermath by focusing on apartness alone, we must also
track interventions, marked by degrees of affirmation and disavowal, in a
continuum of what he calls ‘human foldedness’. The South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) stages the question of complicity,
he shows, by employing a vocabulary that generalises ethico-political
responsibility (referring, for instance, to the ‘little perpetrator’ in each of
us). Literature, too, he argues, stages the drama of the ‘little perpetrator’
in the self, calling upon a reader to assume responsibility for an other in
the name of a generalised ‘foldedness in human-being’ (p 210).
Sanders employs a reading strategy which calls upon the reader to
‘acknowledge one’s occupation by the other, in its more and less aversive
forms’ (p 210) – a strategy which draws out what is both most ‘troubling’
and most ‘enabling’ about human being(s) (p 18). Sanders argues that this
manner of reading applies equally to texts we are accustomed to thinking
of as ‘black resistance texts’. The question of complicity as a context for
assuming responsibility is integral to black intellectual life and to the
tasks that have faced black intellectuals, he argues, a point he goes on to
demonstrate in readings of the work of Sol Plaatje, Bloke Modisane, A C
Jordan and others. Such a reading strategy is one that is profoundly
consonant with Sanders’s overall argument, in that it refuses in itself the
stance of being ‘merely oppositional’. It has no choice but to project itself
‘beyond apartheid’. Sanders suggests a theory and a practice which are
beyond apartness as such.

6
Entanglement
 Sanders’s work draws on a complex interleaving of post-TRC debates in
South Africa and debates in international scholarship about a reconstituted
ethics. The TRC gave rise to, and publicly brought into being, the relation
of self to other as an ethical basis for the post-apartheid polity. The focus
globally on ethics in literary studies and other disciplines has been
reinvigorated by Foucault’s revaluation of the category of the self,
conceiving of the care of the self as an ethical project, combined with the
emergence of Emmanuel Levinas as a model for literary-ethical inquiry.
Whereas previously ethics was seen as a ‘master discourse’ that presumed
a universal humanism and an ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject,
and became a target of critique (the critique of humanism was the exposé
of ethics), work drawing on Foucault and Levinas attempts to do ethics
‘otherwise’ (Garber et al 2000).3 Such work nevertheless leaves us with
further questions about who accords a greater humanity, or ethical
sensitivity, to whom, and the limits of that gesture. Sanders’s notion of
complicity in its wide (rather than punitive) sense enables us to begin the
work of thinking at the limits of apartness.
The fourth rubric I want to consider is an entanglement of people and
things. Although Tim Burke (1996) does not use this particular term he
argues that Marx’s definition of commodity fetishism does not leave
sufficient room for the complexity of relations between things and people,
nor for the imaginative possibilities and unexpected consequences of
commodification, or the intricate emotional and intellectual investments
made by individuals within commodity culture. Bill Brown (2003) has
argued that cultural theory and literary criticism require a comparably
new idiom, beginning with the effort to think with or through the physical
object world, the effort to establish a genuine sense of things that comprise
the stage on which human action, including the action of thought, unfolds.
He concedes a new historicist desire to ‘make contact with the real’4 but
more than this, he wishes to locate an approach which reads ‘like a grittier,
materialist phenomenology of everyday life, a result that might somehow
arrest language’s wish, as described by Michael Serrès (1987, p 111), that
“the whole world … derive from language”’.5 Brown tells a tale of possession
– of being possessed by possessions – and suggests that this amounts to
‘something stranger’ (p 5) than the history of a culture of consumption. It
is not just a case of the way commodity relations come to saturate everyday

7
Introduction
life but the human investment in the physical object world and the mutual
constitution, or entanglement, of human subject and inanimate object. He
aims to sacrifice the clarity of thinking about things as objects of
consumption in order to see how our relation to things cannot be explained
by the cultural logic of capitalism. He makes the case for a kind of
possession that is irreducible to ownership (p 13). This is a relatively new
field of work that has only just begun to surface, but one I want to bear in
mind in relation to several of the chapters which follow.
While each of the four rubrics of entanglement explored above takes us
a considerable way towards a critique of an over-emphasis on difference
in much of the scholarship produced within African and postcolonial studies
in recent decades, none of them considers the new frontier of DNA research.
The fifth rubric worth consideration here has to do with the implications
of the DNA signature. New attention has been paid globally and in post-
apartheid South Africa to the fact that tracing the ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’
genetic lines visible on each individual’s X and Y chromosomes allows
scientists to generate ‘ancestral maps’ charting the geographical location
of ancestors closer to us in time. Identities suggested by ancestral DNA
signatures undercut the rigid conceptions of racial identity in which both
colonial rule and apartheid were based.
Kerry Bystrom (2007) has reported in her work how renowned satirist Pieter-
Dirk Uys, classified as white under apartheid, learned that he had a maternal
line African gene. His response was: ‘That’s really nice. So I’m an African. No
people with black skin can point a finger at me.’ With his typically sharp
sense of irony and wit, Uys, as Bystrom points out, ‘puts his finger on what is
simultaneously wonderful and troubling about the ways in which “African”
identity can be expanded through genetic and familial mapping’. This new
version of the evolutionary family story both provides biological legitimation
for racial equality and opens up ways to conceptualise a non-racial South
African identity. On the other hand, as Bystrom points out, there is a way in
which, as Uys’s comment forces us to consider, the project of defining a broadly
inclusive genetic South African identity risks effacing the divisions entrenched,
and legislated for, by apartheid. Entanglement, as suggested within this
discourse, is both productive and reductive. The DNA debate does the work of
de-familiarisation: it has the ability, as Bystrom writes, to ‘render the familiar
strange and the strange familiar’.

8
Entanglement
 This brings me to the final rubric I want to consider here, one which has
been implicit in some of what has been discussed above but which requires
explicit elucidation, and that is the notion of racial entanglement. In the
late 1970s Eduard Glissant, reflecting on the issue of race, identity and
belonging in the Caribbean (1992), used the term entanglement to refer to
the ‘point of difficulty’ of creolised beginnings. ‘We must return,’ he wrote,
‘to the point from which we started, not a return to the longing for origins,
to some immutable state of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement,
from which we were forcefully turned away; that is where we must
ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish (p 26).6
Globally the 1990s gave rise to a new focus on race and ethnicity, falling
largely within two contending lines of thought. The first strand, widely
known as critical race studies, paid renewed attention to racism and
identity. It focused on ‘hidden, invisible forms of racist expression and
well-established patterns of racist exclusion that remain unaddressed and
uncompensated for, structurally marking opportunities and access,
patterns of income and wealth, privilege and relative power’ (Essed &
Goldberg 2002, p 4). ‘Critical race studies’ finds institutional racism,
patterns of racial exclusion, and structurally marked patterns of access
as prevalent as before, if not more so. Such work draws on the writings of
Du Bois, Fanon, Carmichael, Gramsci, Davis, Carby and Roediger, among
many others, to articulate the nature of racial hegemony in the
contemporary world, but especially in the United States.
A second, contrasting, strand of race studies approached the
contemporary question of race in a manner which takes us closer to the
idea of entanglement. For Paul Gilroy (2000) racial markers are not
immutable in time and space. Gilroy, like a number of writers before him,
including Fanon and Said, has argued for a humanism conceived explicitly
as a response to the sufferings that racism and ‘race thinking’ have
wrought. He argues that in the 21st century race politics and anti-racist
laws have not created an equal society and that what is needed in response
is a re-articulation of an anti-racist vision – as a politics in itself. In his
view, the most valuable resources for the elaboration of such a humanism
derive from ‘a principled, cross-cultural approach to the history and literature
of extreme situations in which the boundaries of what it means to be human
were being negotiated and tested minute by minute, day by day’ (p 87).

9
Introduction
 In more recent work, Gilroy (2004) has drawn on the resources of a
vibrant and complex ‘multiculture’ in both Britain and the United States
to reveal an alternative discourse of race already at work in contemporary
life. In their work on whiteness, Vron Ware and Les Back challenge a
discourse of ‘separate worlds’, which, in their view, structures so much
contemporary thinking about race (especially in the United States), finding
it to be a ‘bleak formula’, a prepackaged view of the world which suggests
that ‘how you look largely determines how you see’ (p 17). What difference
does it make, they ask, when people in societies structured according to
racial dominance turn away from the privilege inherent in whiteness? Or
when the anti-race act is performed, by whom, and in whose company?
John Hartigan (1999) argues that public debate and scholarly discussion
on the subject of race are burdened by allegorical tendencies (he writes
about the United States, but much of what he says refers directly to South
Africa too). Abstract racial figures, he writes, ‘dominate our thinking, each
condensing the specificities of peoples’ lives into strictly delimited
categories – “whites and blacks” to name the most obvious’.
Given the national stage on which the dramas of race unfold, certain
broad readings of racial groups across the country are warranted, Hartigan
concedes. But as such spectacles ‘come to represent the meaning of race
relations, they obscure the many complex encounters, exchanges and
avoidances that constitute the persistent significance of race in the United
States’ (p 3). On the one hand, social researchers grapple with the enduring
effect of racism and rely on the figures of ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ to do this; on
the other, they argue, unconvincingly, it seems, that races are mere social
constructs. ‘How are we to effect a change in Americans’ tendency to view
social life through a lens of “black and white” when we rely upon and
reproduce the same categories in our analyses and critiques of the way
race matters in this country?,’ he asks (p 3). The argument here is that we
can loosen the powerful hold of the cultural figures of ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’
by challenging the economy of meaning they maintain. That is, by grasping
the instances and situations in which the significance of race spills out of
the routinised confines of these absolute figures, we can begin to rethink
the institutionalisation of racial difference and similarity.
In South African literary and cultural scholarship there has been, since
the mid-1990s, a departure from earlier work in which race was largely

10
Entanglement
left unproblematised and was treated as a given category in which
difference was essentialised. Such work had focused, like the anti-apartheid
movement itself, on fighting legalised and institutionalised racism rather
than on analysing the making of racial identity per se. In more recent
work, however, there has been an insistence on race in order to deconstruct
it (Steyn 2001; Distiller & Steyn 2004; Erasmus 2001; Ebrahim-Vally 2001).
Thus Distiller & Steyn, in their book Under Construction: ‘Race’ and
Identity in South Africa Today, aim to address the ‘need for a vocabulary
of race in South Africa today’ (p 2) and to ‘challenge the artificiality of
“whiteness” and “blackness” and to explore the implications of an insistence
on policing their boundaries and borders’ (p 7). Significantly, the first South
African academic conference dedicated to the issue of race took place only
in 2001, co-hosted by the newly formed Wits Institute for Social and
Economic Research (WISER) and the Wits History Workshop, and entitled
‘The Burden of Race’.
These, then, are some of the ways in which the term entanglement has
been used by scholars, or indirectly suggested in their work. I draw strongly
on them in the chapters that follow. Although I frame them in my own
analytical grammar, each carries traces of the above articulation by other
scholars. Entanglement offers, for me, a rubric in terms of which we can
begin to meet the challenge of the ‘after apartheid’. It is a means by which
to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as
separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of
intersection in unexpected ways. It is an idea which signals largely
unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from a common, though often
coercive and confrontational, experience. It enables a complex temporality
of past, present and future; one which points away from a time of resistance
towards a more ambivalent moment in which the time of potential, both
latent and actively surfacing in South Africa, exists in complex tandem
with new kinds of closure and opposition. It also signals a move away
from an apartheid optic and temporal lens towards one which reifies neither
the past nor the exceptionality of South African life.
A focus on entanglement in part speaks to the need for a utopian horizon,
while always being profoundly mindful of what is actually going on. Such
a horizon carries particular weight in societies which confront the
precariousness of life, crime, poverty, AIDS and violence on a daily basis;

11
Introduction
it suggests the importance, too, of holding ‘heretical conversations’ in order
to question and even, at times, dislodge or supersede the tropes and analytical
foci which quickly harden into conventions of how we read the ‘now’. So, too,
reading through entanglement makes it necessary to find registers for writing
about South Africa that enable properly trans-national conversations.
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.
The first chapter seeks a defamiliarising way of reading the historical
and contemporary South African cultural archive by employing a lens of
entanglement. One of the aspects the chapter explores is the possibilities
and limits of an Anglicised and Africanised category of the creole. Within
the larger rubric of entanglement it places a specific emphasis on how to
come to terms with a legacy of violence in a society based on inequality,
drawing on creolisation’s own origins within the historical experience of
slavery and its aftermath. It goes on to re-examine, in the light of this
initial discussion, regional variations and the implications for how we read
race and class in South Africa.
The chapter moves away from what Hofmeyr (2005) has referred to as
the ‘hydraulic models of domination and resistance’ traversing neo-Marxist

12
Entanglement
and nationalist accounts towards a project of making ‘the ambiguous
networks and trajectories of the postcolonial state legible’ (p 130). It looks
for analytical formations which increasingly inscribe South African life
into a body of work done elsewhere on the continent, especially Mbembe’s
(1993) idea that oppressor and oppressed do not inhabit incommensurate
spheres: rather, that they share the same episteme. It moves across
disciplines, searching for disturbances, fluctuations, oscillations in
conventional accounts, looking for configurations of space, identity, race
and class usually left unexpressed, and dormant.
In Chapter Two, entitled ‘Literary City’, I write about ways in which
Johannesburg is emerging in recent city fiction. I explore, that is, notions
of entanglement from the vantage point of city life and city forms, of the
making of citiness in writing. ‘Citiness’ refers to modes of being and acting in
the city as city and it encompasses histories of violence, loss and xenophobia
as well as those of experimentation and desegregation.
My aim in the chapter is to explore the modes of metropolitan life – the
‘infrastructures’ – which come to light in contemporary fiction of the city.
These infrastructures include the street, the café, the suburb and the
campus – assemblages of citiness in which fictional life worlds intersect
with the actual, material rebuilding of the post-apartheid city. I explore
some of the figures to which these urban infrastructures give rise: the
stranger, the aging white man, the suburban socialite, the hustler.
Of particular interest is what the metropolitan form can offer, via its
fictional texts, in relation to the remaking of race. To what kinds of
separation and connectedness does it give rise? In what ways, if at all,
does it exceed the metaphors of race and the binaries to which it gives rise
and how, as Helgesson (2006) puts it, do characters move through and
across long-established representational regimes? Citiness in
Johannesburg, I argue, is an intricate entanglement of éclat and
sombreness, light and darkness, comprehension and bewilderment, polis
and necropolis, desegregation and resegregation.
In Chapter Three I focus on autobiographies and related narratives of
the self written by whites from the mid-1990s onwards, a period which, in
my view, marks a major shift in the ways in which whiteness began to be
looked at as the embeddedness of race in the legal and political fabric of
South Africa started to crack.

13
Introduction
 The chapter, entitled ‘Secrets and Lies’, develops a set of arguments
around, on the one hand, looking and watching, modes which appear to
inhabit certain versions of ‘unofficial’ whiteness (the act of watching others
watching the self, for instance) but on the other, and more predominantly,
around the secrets and sometimes the lies, which inhabit the negotiation
of whiteness. In almost all the bodies of work considered confronting one’s
whiteness is also confronting one’s secret life, including the untruths –
latent, blatant, imminent, potent – that inhabit the white self.
The chapter aims to offer an alternative route through the South African
archive of whiteness by attending to what I have called its ‘unofficial’
versions, within a context of long-held racist assumptions and practices.
Thus it considers some of the resources available in South African society
to crack open the discourses of whiteness, and therefore blackness, in the
context of ‘the now’. It also aims to show the complexity of these unofficial
versions, revealing their largely under-researched duplicity, uncertainty,
vulnerability: their secret life.
Chapter Four, ‘Surface and Underneath’, is written in two parts. It takes
as its defining idea the notion of Johannesburg as a city with a surface
and an underneath. The early part of the chapter explores this concept,
suggesting its historical, psychic and hermeneutic dimensions. In broad
terms, we might consider this a city in which the ‘surfaces’ of a highly
developed industrialised capitalist economy and its attendant set of media
cultures are entangled with a subliminal memory of life below the surface
– a history of labour repression based on a racial hierarchy; of alienation,
but also of insurrection.
If the surface and underneath are part of the historical and psychic life
of the city they also finds expression in its literary and cultural formations.
The first section focuses on Ivan Vladislavi ’s account of living in
Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys (2006), and then on two texts by young
black South African writers, both published in 2007, which both focus on
the concept of the ‘coconut’. The ‘coconut’, a pervasive shorthand for a
person who is ‘black on the outside but white on the inside’, also relies on
the metaphor of a surface and an underneath and tells us something
important about current framings of cross-racial life in the city. In the
second part I consider a series of paintings by Johannesburg artist Penny
Siopis, known as the Pinky Pinky series. While her work has been read

14
Entanglement
almost exclusively within the register of trauma, I argue that the series
reveals a new capaciousness in her figuring of urban life and the desires it
produces. Siopis turns her attention to the surface as a painterly and
analytical space, and the series suggests the emergence, if tentative, of a
more horizontal or spliced mode of reading.
Chapter Five tries to capture something of the immense coincidence, so
tangible in Johannesburg at present, between the end of apartheid and
the rise of new media culture and cultures of consumption. The chapter,
called ‘Self-Styling’, aims to show how we might take the surface more
seriously in our analyses of contemporary cultural form even where
contemporary youth media cultural forms in Johannesburg still signal to
and cite the underneath of an apartheid past. In the first part I explore
the rise of a youth cultural form widely known as ‘Y Culture’. Y Culture,
also known as loxion kulcha, is an emergent youth culture in Johannesburg
which moves across various media forms and generates a ‘compositional
remixing’ that signals an emergent politics of style, shifting the emphasis
away from an earlier era’s resistance politics. It is a culture of the hip
bucolic which works across a series of surfaces in order to produce enigmatic
and divergent styles of self-making. In the second part I consider a recent
set of advertisements that have appeared on billboards and in magazines
in the wake of Y Culture, showing how they simultaneously engage with
and push in unexpected directions one of the most striking aspects of Y/
loxion culture, an attempt to reread race in the city. In analysing the
advertisements I consider ways in which commodity images, and the
market itself, produce re-imaginings of race in the city. How to read these
commodified versions of entanglement (which are embedded in a much
longer history of consumption and its media forms in this country) and
what they can tell us about the remaking, or otherwise, of race in the city,
is a question the chapter works with in its concluding section.
Chapter Six – ‘Girl Bodies’ – turns to issues of sexuality, and, in particular,
to child rape. The chapter draws on an anecdote of a kind: an image,
accompanied by a short text in a newspaper, to consider a subject left
largely aside in earlier chapters: the question of gender and sexuality in
the making of South Africa’s political transition, and of the violence
which has emerged, somewhat spectacularly, into the post-apartheid
public sphere. 7

15
Introduction
 My account, which is written in the first person, focuses on the
manufacture of anti-rape devices for girls and women – new technologies
of the sexualised body. Through the telling of a story I explore how
technology itself assigns changing meanings to the domains of the public
and the private. I draw out, in the chapter, common interest – and trust in
technology – among women from different race and ethnic groups – black
and white, Tswana and Afrikaner. I explore sets of fantasies about
technological solutions in relation to the body which are currently
circulating globally but which take on radically local inflections. The
chapter considers forms of re-segregation in a wider context of
desegregation, and how re-segregation can be based on cross-racial
complicities of a kind in a ‘post-racist’ context. In this chapter I subject a
notion of entanglement to its limits, while also examining its most
disturbing connotations. Examining the concept from the perspective of
its outer edges helps to strengthen our understanding of how it works,
where it can be useful, and what aporias we need to be alert to.
The chapters draw on a range of critical and writerly vocabularies. They
include that which lies dormant in our analysis most of the time, that
which offers a singular versus a general view, and the force of the anecdotal,
a register of the unexpected in critical orthodoxies. In doing so, they capture
something, I hope, of the complex trajectories of change in South Africa,
at the level of content but also of form. In what follows I have wanted to
speak about the politics of change as well as the ideas and experiences of
self which underlie the social; the potential of metropolitan life as well as
its foreclosures; the life of the body as well as the mind; cultures of the
city as well as feudal imaginaries of the heartland; legacies, as well as
contemporary practices, of racial and sexual violence. Put differently,
this book explores ways we find of living together, of occupying the city,
secrets we keep or tell, the life of the body, our desire for things, the
darkness of sex.

16
Entanglement
 Entanglement

1
C H A P T E R

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

17
Entanglement
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

18
Entanglement
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

19
Entanglement
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

20
Entanglement
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

21
Entanglement
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.

22
Entanglement
 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

23
Entanglement
(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 trans-
continental 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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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