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Anthropological Myths, Racial Archives and The UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Pigments of Our Imagination: Anthropological Myths, Racial Archives and the Transnationalism of Apartheid A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Kirk Bryan Sides 2014 © Copyright by Kirk Bryan Sides 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Pigments of Our Imagination: Anthropological Myths, Racial Archives and the Transnationalism of Apartheid by Kirk Bryan Sides Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Jennifer Sharpe, Chair “Pigments of Our Imagination: Anthropological Myths, Racial Archives and the Transnationalism of Apartheid” repositions South African cultural production within discourses on Africa, the Black Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. By focusing on apartheid’s intellectual origins, this project begins by mapping the production of a transnational race discourse between Germany and South Africa in order to situate apartheid within a broader circulation of ideas on race and colonial governmentality. I argue that this transnational dialogue embodies a larger shift in the racial technologies utilized by nation-states over the course of the twentieth century, in which the employment of anthropology gained increasing significance in the development of national race policies. Exploring the ways in which pre-apartheid intellectuals articulated a ‘new language’ for representing race to the state, I demonstrate that as apartheid ideology coalesced it ii did so under an increasingly cartographical rubric for imagining how races were to be organized within South Africa. As a form of colonial racial governance, I show how apartheid’s geographical mapping of race was also ideologically buttressed by a historical imperative of projecting ideas of racial difference and distinction back into the southern African past. I argue that this mythologizing was part of apartheid’s attempt to ‘ground’ itself as an organic, and indigenous, ideology of the South Africa nation. In order to interrogate this racist mythology, I trace a history of South African cultural production – from early, pre-apartheid black literature to contemporary performance and visual art – that, in demonstrating a consistent discourse on racial and cultural creolization in South Africa, runs counter to apartheid mythologies of separation. In the final chapter, I move towards an ‘oceanic’ critique of apartheid’s rigid, continentally-based system of classification. I argue that the visual economies of the Indian Ocean offer a regional vantage point from which to view South African apartheid as part of a nexus of transoceanic exchange across the southern tip of Africa. I conclude that a history of creolization discourse in South Africa not only undoes the equation of apartheid as an exceptionalist, national anomaly, but also demonstrates South Africa’s entanglement in in the global circulation of racial ideas. iii The dissertation of Kirk Bryan Sides is approved. David Theo Goldberg Françoise Lionnet Dominic R. Thomas Jennifer Sharpe, Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to Manoush Aghakhani, who has been an active and patient reader and listener to nearly every word of this text in its various manifestations, to my family Bryan Sides and Julie Sides, and to Vicki Papaemanuel for clearing some of the path before me; and to my dissertation committee members, Jenny Sharpe, Françoise Lionnet, Dominic Thomas and David Theo Goldberg for their thoughtful criticism and invaluable insights. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Cartographies, Geographies and Classifications: Landed Racial Imaginaries and Towards a Creolization History of South Africa…………………………………...1 – 20 1. In and Out of Africa: The Race of Anthropology and Towards a Transnational History of Apartheid……………………………………………………………………………..21 – 85 Germany’s Colonial Nostalgia and South Africa’s Racial Futures: Carl Meinhof’s Africa and the Theological Language of Race Kulturekreise: the Language of Race and the Space of Homelands Racial Mapping and Maps as Race: the Debate between Carl Meinhof and N. J. van Warmelo The Anthropology of Politics: Writing across Categories and Creolized Language 2. Geographies of Creolization: Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka and the ‘Forgotten’ Canon of African Literature………………………………………………………………….86 – 140 Chaka and the “Problem” of African Literature Mofolo’s Creolization of Difference and Creolization with a Difference South Africa, 1909: A British Dominion, a White Nation Three Approaches to Chaka: ‘Problems’, Refiguring, and (not) Talking about Creolization “A national culture is not a folktale”: Achebe, Canonicity and the Invention of African Culture The Anthropologist and the Storyteller: Untimely Narratives 3. Apartheid’s Transnational Other: Remembering Slavery and Rethinking Race across the Atlantic…………………………………………………………………………..141 – 195 Which Black Atlantic? : Africa and the ‘Blind spots’ of Transoceanic Modernity Thinking from the ‘Post’: Post-apartheid, Postcolonial, Post-racial and Articulating Modernity Out of Place: ‘Minor’ Culture and the (Creolized) Politics of Space “The question of the century:” Racial modernity, Racial Futures, and Racial Homelands vi What the Future Looked Like: Arborescent Metaphors and Verwoerd’s “Big Idea of Separate Development” “Memory is what you make of it”: Ghost Trees and the Creolization of Modernity 4. Framing the Debate on Race: Creolized Histories and Oceanic Futures in Berni Searle’s Colour me Series……………………………………………………………………….196 – 251 Apartheid outside South Africa: Geographical Frames, Apartheid Historiography and Creolizations South African Creolizations: Slavery, Opacity and Solidarities Histories of Spice and Spiced Bodies: The Apartheid Narrative of South African History The Spiced Body and the Pull of Oceans: Towards an Oceanic Critique of Apartheid Outside of National Languages of Race: Searle’s Ethnography with/out Bodies Spice Archives Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...252 – 263 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Taking stock of intellectual debt, in being largely an account of one’s life, is a difficult and necessarily incomplete reckoning. In approaching this Sisyphean task, I want to begin by thanking a number of teachers whose influence is clear not only in this project but also in the daily intellectual practices of my life, even if these individuals might remain unaware of their impact. This dissertation is a token of my gratitude to a number of individuals. Firstly, to Georg Kleine, whose mentorship many years ago was both exacting and unwavering, even if I didn’t understand what it meant at the time. To Roy van Neste, and countless afternoons in office hours and for teaching me what it meant to write. Also, to Doug Sparks, for whom there are too many anecdotes and examples of how your influence continues in my life: for walks through the streets of New York; for Chaucer, for Nietzsche; for Dylan, and for an example of academic humility that has remained with me all these years. Finally, to Zhand Shakibi, who knew something of me before I did, and has traveled from similar places. I am forever indebted to Jenny Sharpe, who entertained my extremely preliminary ideas, and who had the intellectual patience to help me form them into this completed dissertation. Her advice and sense of critique as a mentor remain my sources of diligence. I hope I have become a better writer and a better thinker for her keeping me on my toes. I will happily spend my academic career fulfilling the intellectual and professional debt to Françoise Lionnet, who has been the source of myriad and productive paths throughout my graduate tenure; and for a ceaselessly graceful style of academic rigor, a style I can only hope to emulate. I would also like to thank Dominic Thomas, who remains very close to the genesis of this project, as well as David Theo Goldberg, who has selflessly shared contacts, resources, and insights. To Allen and Polly Roberts, I do not know how to say thank you for such academic and intellectual generosity, viii which are also sources of this project. Gil Hochberg believed in me at a crucial moment in my life, and it has made all the difference. Gil didn’t flinch at a young, naïve and would-be graduate student; I believe she saw that my slight unorthodoxy was a sign of my determination. In many ways she is the reason I came through a graduate program in Comparative Literature. For this I am eternally grateful. Aamir Mufti remains one of the most formative influences in my academic career: your critical approach has been a compass. Ali Behdad and Efrain Kristal also deserve recognition here, for being remarkable examples of academic leadership as chairs of Comparative Literature at UCLA during my tenure; and for both of them always believing in me, even when I was unsure of myself. Of course, any of the faults or shortcomings of this project remain my own, and deserve apologies in advance. There are those relationships whose impact manifests only over the course of one’s life. There are two such individuals whose critical minds, sustaining conversations, and collaborations have made this project what it aspires to be, Indra Mukhopadhyay and Duncan M. Yoon. To Indra, who knows friendship beyond conditions or explanations, and to Duncan, whose loyalty has sustained me in dark times, I look forward to a lifetime of friendship and intellectual exchange with you both. I have also been fortunate enough to receive generous
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