Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid

By Sarah Nuttall

This original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the present. The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name. In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation with a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781868146321

Sarah Nuttall

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Book preview

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

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.

Entanglement

Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid

Sarah Nuttall

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

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   Entanglement

2   Literary City

3   Secrets and Lies

4   Surface and Underneath

5   Self-Styling

6   Girl Bodies

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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 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.

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.

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 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. 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.

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 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 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.

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