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Reframing the Black Subject Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation

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Reframing the Black Subject Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation Third Text ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 Reframing the black subject ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African representation Okwui Enwezor To cite this article: Okwui Enwezor (1997) Reframing the black subject ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African representation, Third Text, 11:40, 21-40, DOI: 10.1080/09528829708576684 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829708576684 Published online: 19 Jun 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1302 View related articles Citing articles: 13 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20 Third Text 40, Autumn 1997 21 Reframing the Black Subject Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation Okwui Enwezor In the house adjacent to the one in which I live of an old nationalist symbol, with its in a suburb of Johannesburg, my Afrikaner undisguised history and terrifying con- neighbour makes it a duty, every weekend and sequences, is nothing new. It has companions on public holidays, to unfurl on his flag pole, in the recent fascist revivalism that has the blue, white and orange colours of the old engulfed Europe in the aftermath of the cold South African nation. Like all symbols of war with the return of swastikas and Nazi nationalistic identification, this particular flag symbolism, and the more enduring history of raises very paradoxical emotions in people, the Confederacy flag in the southern United each of which — mortification or nostalgia — States. invariably arrive with grave consequences on Reading this image in the uneasy light the direction which South Africa, seem which governs South Africa's return to the irrevocably plunged. While it has become quite ranks of modern nations, the flag display rare today to find a South African of any race reveals, and at the same time masks, certain who was not either a staunch supporter of the anxieties around the transition from apartheid African National Congress or an anti-apartheid to a representative, tolerant, liberal democracy. activist, my new neighbours have in very stark As I write this, I am listening to the wind snap terms welcomed me into the side of a South the stiff cloth and colours of the fading flag. I African political and social debate that is not am fascinated by that sound, by the rituality of easily addressed in public. They have done so the owner's forlorn hope. However, my South by making it very clear on which side of the African companion is less enamoured of my ideological plane their allegiances lie. From the fascination with that ideological prop of look of things, it seems nothing has changed for longing, the lost dream of a fallen nation whose these people and thousands of others like them haunted past is very much part of the present, who still persistently dream of the return of the a sentinel that echoes the ambivalence and the old nation. So nostalgia, cleansed of very desires of both the new South African nation, poisonous memories endures, and is thus and the fantasy of a time fast fading with the justified in the almost fatalistic clinging to a bleached tricolour of the old flag. However relic of racism. In many ways this defiant usage hopeful one may sound in articulating the 22 novelty and newness of South Africa, we must traumatic experiences of the twentieth century: constantly remind ourselves that, while nations the long, terrible, insomniac night of apartheid. may disappear, the ideologies which feed and Dialectically, what one encounters within this sustain them, and which form the foundational scripted and representational presence is a basis of their creation, are more difficult to nation seeking a new identity, and thus new eradicate. For they are imaginatively images, new geographies, boundaries with reconstituted by using the surplus resources of which to ballast its strategic and mythological their enduring myths as banners to rally coherence and unity as what has come to be adherents. known, popularly, as the Rainbow Nation. To Thus in late 1996, two years after the legal put it bluntly, such a search is clearly related to fall of apartheid, it is hardly revealing to how differently whiteness and its privileges is observe that racism and racial suspicion remain presently conceived, interpreted, translated rampant realities of the new South African and used to access the code of a disturbed sense state. We can hear it in the resplendent, of South African nationality. Thus to examine undisguised accent of those anxious voices the charged descriptive detail and what strikes who still await the owl of Minerva to return at the mortal heart of the 'New South Africa' — with the news that the experiment was a multilingual, and hopefully, multivocal — is to failure: the 'natives' are simply ill-prepared to keen one's ears to the new uses and revindi- run a functioning, well-oiled state. In pointing cation of whiteness (in very subdued and out the above, I am less interested in the barely registered forms) as an idiom of cultural fraught political context out of which these identity, that is, as a renewed and authoritative issue than I am in using the questions which presence in the country's iconographical text. they raise to examine issues of representation in a culture which has lived for generations with racist stereotypes as one of the most II prevailing attitudes amongst members of its social polity. To sketch out the image fully, I Although today the word 'identity' has lost the want to begin with two analogous depictions lustre of its discursive currency, especially as that run synchronously: Baas and Massa, Kaffir multicultural and postcolonial discourse come and Nigger, The Hottentot and the auction under persistent academic attack, it would block, Jim Crow and apartheid. These analogies seem that South Africa has arrived belatedly to sketch out an ideological pattern that runs such contestations. Yet, it might be worth through the histories of both the United States adding that in reality everything about South of America and South Africa. Africa in the last fifty years has often been Their uncanny resemblance, however, is not defined along this axis. Thus its belatedness, an accident. For they are both founded on could justifiably be seen from the position of its blackness as anathema to the discourse of rearguard position vis-à-vis how identity up whiteness; whiteness as a resource out of which until recently had been bounded to the archaic the trope of the nation, nationality and formulation of w.hiteness as a nationalistic citizenship is constructed, and everything else desire. that is prior is negated, defaced, marginalised, To be WHITE in many senses is an colonised. By thinking analogously of the two ideological fantasy. In discursive terms, it is a systems of whiteness as official policy, and as a fantasy framed in the old mode of nationalist mechanism of bureaucratic normality, I want to address (pursued with brutal efficiency by old extrapolate from the cultural text of the United apartheid ideologues), the arena in which all States to make a commentary on the fascinating kinds of ideological longings converge, and are usage, in post-apartheid representation, of the recovered in terms of a specific socio-political African body as subject and prop in both the agenda and historical formation. Such an political and cultural expressions of the 'New agenda and formation have often been South Africa1. replayed in the charged territory of racial This retrieval of the black figure from the pathologies, the kind which Benedict Anderson debased image bank of the former apartheid in Imagined Communities described as "the state is not surprising at all. Nor is it magic to turn chance into destiny". This in turn necessarily new; it is parcelled in the speech act is invested with symbolic signs and positive of a 'nation' emerging from one of the most values of origin, space, and a sense of who 23 occupies that space, who owns it, who lords render the exactitude of its character, to probe over it, and for whose benefit it is worked. In its borders and alleviate its insecurity, to draw the specific example of South Africa, as in the it into light through all kinds of signifying American model, the identity of whiteness devices, the birthright of such utterance (which binds itself to the exclusionary politics of included speaking on behalf of the 'native') national discourse. Who is included or ex- ultimately belonged to the white interlocutor. cluded from that body politic and on what terms is their admittance or exclusion ratified? Until recently in South Africa, as typified by Ill Germany's jus sanguinis ethnic policy, citizen- ship (nationality) was a special animus that But what is it exactly, that makes whiteness carried the Calvinist symbol of whiteness. For it such an exorbitant space of subjectivity, as the not only declaimed belonging from the position argot of unimpeachable and irrefutable of exclusion, it effectively rendered millions of testimony of the knowledge of the colonised the indigenous population persona non grata. native? With whiteness, one can hazard saying Under such definition, to challenge the sanctity — though this might imply an essentialist of whiteness, to represent it adversely, either in projection or even a prejudicial marking — that writing or image-making, to question the its tropes can be related to what Claire Kahane, Calvinist ethic of racial purity on which it is following psychoanalytic theory, has written of founded, is to court terrible reprisals (brutal as "object relations theory". She writes that, beatings, ban orders, jail, solitary confinement, "Object relations theory assumes that from exile, death) or to be cast out of the inner birth, the infant engages in formative relations sanctum of the broederbond.
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