Even as South African ‘apartheid' (that ‘most racist of racisms', Derrida 1985) was dismantled in the 1990s, we entered an era in which racialized and other forms of separation, oppression and exploitation have increasingly dominated societies everywhere because of the effects of globalization on the one hand and because of the weakening of certain political forces that have restrained racism on the other (Balibar 2008). With this seeming historical paradox as its point of departure and thinking with the historical particular of ‘apartheid' and colonialism in Africa, this seminar attends to race and racism (as well as patriarchy, gender and sexism) as objects of knowledge (including anti-racist knowledge) both in disciplinary and in public discourses. The seminar will also explore the possibility that apartheid has, in some senses, been global all along; that racism and sexism are constitutive of modernity from the very start. That these questions are not merely theoretical but have practical and political consequences - and violent outcomes - makes the task of describing and explaining phenomena of discrimination all the more urgent, especially given the terrible correspondence of racism and sexism.
This seminar will address the questions raised by apartheid, race/racism and violence for history. A preliminary list of readings includes (excerpts from) works by Adam Ashforth, Étienne Balibar, Walter Benjamin, Steve Biko, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Hermann Giliomee, Paul Gilroy, David Theo Goldberg, Alfred Hoernlé, Achille Mbembe, Silas Modiri Molema, Deborah Posel, Leopold Senghor, Hendrik Verwoerd, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter & Katherine McKittrick.