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Texturing Difference: Indigeneity, Tactility, and the Text of “black consciousness philosophy” A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Maurits M. van Bever Donker IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisor: Qadri Ismail Co-Advisor: Thomas Pepper February 2013 © Maurits M. van Bever Donker 2013 i Acknowledgements This research has been made possible by the generous support of a number of organizations and projects: the financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF. The support of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change/Mellon Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota made this research possible. I would also like to acknowledge the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape for providing the space and time necessary to write. I have had the opportunity to present aspects of my research at various conferences and colloquia both in the United States and in South Africa. The respondents to my work are too many to name, but their intellectual rigor and generosity have both shaped my research and my sense of what academic engagement can be, and for this I am truly grateful. There are many who have stood with me throughout this journey and who have often been subjected to listening to or even reading my work, I cannot name you all (and so will not name any) but I am indebted to each of you for the generosity of your thought and your time. My committee, Qadri Ismail, Tom Pepper, John Mowitt, Jani Scandura, and Premesh Lalu, have all been exquisite interlocutors in this project. For the final edit I thank Tom, although of course any errors that remain are my own. Finally, few have had to endure this tumultuous ride as persistently and as close to the source as Kirstin, my wife: we began this with three; we end it with five. For clarity, patience, and the capacity to laugh, I know that I can always come to you. ii Dedication For Jesse, Avila, Axel, and Kirstin. iii Abstract Texturing Difference: Indigeneity, Tactility, and the Text of “black consciousness philosophy” intervenes into contemporary debates around the postcolonial critique of apartheid through offering a new sense of an ‘undisclosed event’ in the broader text of black consciousness philosophy. In approaching this broader text, I stitch together works that are considered to be more overtly political, such as the Freedom Charter and the interventions of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, with a number of more literary interventions by Mongane Wally Serote, Jeremy Cronin, Aimé Césaire, J.M. Coetzee, and Ousmane Sembène, and read this weave into the problem of what comes after apartheid. The literary as it emerges in this project offers a sense of reading that tracks well with Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the rhizomatic, and that is brought to bear on the more overtly political works that are generally taken as constituting its measure. It is precisely this act of reading that stages what is at stake in literature and its pedagogy as I inscribe it here: the literary emerges as essential to the attempt to not merely transcribe the lived experience of the black man but to think what it would be to inscribe such experience into the realm of community as such – what I have termed the community of the touch. Unfolding through four key moves that deal with the concepts of community, indigeneity, tactility, and life, as these are reworked and opened up in the touches that take place at the edge of the text of black consciousness philosophy, I argue that it calls for the practice of singularity as the living of a life—a life that does not expel, or vomit, the lived experience of the black man. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………….......... i Dedication ……………………………………………………………………… ii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………… iii Table of Contents …………………………………………………………….. iv Introduction: Practicing life in the post-apartheid ………………………. 1 Stumbling on Community ………………………………………………. 22 Of touching and the gaze …………………………………………… 26 The Concept of Apartheid and the Freedom Charter ………………… 42 A Community after apartheid? …………………………………………… 61 Indigeneity in the wake of Man ………………………………………. 95 Turning through Césaire …………………………………………… 104 Slicing: Cutting/Brushing …………………………………………… 107 Negritude: a cry ……………………………………………………. 117 Spacing Encounters ……………………………………………………. 142 Face-to-face? Contact in the Storm …………………………………… 152 Tactility ……………………………………………………………….. 174 Running out of joint …………………………………………………….. 178 The structure of blackness in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks ………… 186 White Genesis and the weight of Man …………………………………… 210 A Life […] ……………………………………………………………….. 236 The philosophy of black consciousness …………………………………… 251 A question of Freedom …………………………………………………….. 277 Conclusion: Reading Encounters ……………………………………….. 320 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………….. 327 1 Practicing Life in the post-apartheid It is not a question of whether people are ready or not. It is a question of whether people should be made ready or not. Steve Biko, “Interview with Steve Biko”, p 291 Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. Gilles Deleuze, “21st Series of the Event”, p 1492 The present moment in South Africa asks for life to be practiced, or at least for such a practice to be learned, in the wake of apartheid. However, what is most apparent in this moment is the persistence of what can be understood as apartheid’s remainders as these cut into the potentialities of this life that remains to be learned. In what is perhaps a more cynical tone, it is possible to argue that the persistence of these remainders deeply marks the post-apartheid present with what is characterized as a general failure of the promise of the liberation struggle. This has come to be expressed in two dominant forms: on the one hand, there are increasing instances of protracted struggle by ‘communities’ against the ANC led government on the terms of what is called “service delivery”3 and, on the other 1 Gail M. Gerhart, “Interview with Steve Biko”. In: Mngxitama, A., Alexander, A. and Gibson, N.C. (eds), Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 2 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense. [1969] Translated from the French by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London: The Athlone Press, 1990. 3 As Achille Mbembe has argued, framing these protests as focusing on service delivery is, of course, a somewhat straightforward containment strategy – it obscures political and economic responsibilities (Mbembe, A. “Biko’s Testament of Hope” (2007: 4, 12). See further Carrim, Y. “Towards better understanding of service delivery protests” (2010), Grobler, F. “Service-delivery protests a ‘warning sign’ for government” (2009), and Vavi, Z. “What would Chris Hani say?” (2010) for three distinct perspectives on these struggles from Government, the (neo) Liberal Media, and COSATU respectively. In more recent months these tensions have begun to be expressed through a series of increasingly violent instances of strike action in the mining and agricultural sections of the South African economy, the most notorious of these having culminated in the Marikana Massacre in which 34 Miners were shot dead during a stand-off with the South African Police Service—an event that drew immediate parallels in the media with the 2 hand, within political discourses there is a noticeable shift to the “re-racialisation” of the political.4 However, through setting to work within the weave of what I define as the broader text of black consciousness philosophy (a designation that refers, I argue in the opening chapter, to a constellation of texts that take the production of the black-I as non-I as a conceptual problematic that demands intervention), I contend that an adequate thinking of this apparent failure of promise requires that the present be considered as a realization of the trajectory of struggle that was encapsulated in the adoption of the much celebrated Freedom Charter of 1955. In other words, it is necessary to consider how the South African present might precisely not be characterized by a failure of promise, but rather by the arrival of the very politics that opened its possibility. What is brought into view through framing the problem in this manner is the mode through which the present politics of South Africa can be read as derivative of a particular understanding of subjectivity that conditions its potentialities, rather than as a quagmire of events that obscures, and even constrains, its potency. This is not to argue that the material conditions of existence in post-apartheid South Africa are not important—as though lived experience is not marked by them—or that the struggle against apartheid as it was framed by the Freedom Charter should be rejected. Rather, through abiding by a different potentiality that can, perhaps, only be (re-) turned in the wake of this struggle, I suggest that the work of coming after apartheid, to learn to live in Sharpville Massacre in 1960. Cf. Saturday Star, “Marikana Massacre” (18 December 2012) and Micah Reddy, “Marikana is the latest chapter in a long saga” (24 October 2012). 4 Cf. Xolela Mangcu, “Nelson Mandela and the Unfinished Business of Identity Politics in South Africa”, Nelson Mandela Foundation Dialogue on “Justice, Rights, Race and Power in Post-apartheid South Africa” (2009). Mangcu’s argument is noteworthy for its crisp formulation of the resurging place of race and tribalism in South African politics. However, his rather paradoxical formulation that this resurgence is due to the unfinished work of identity politics is a little wanting. 3 its wake, is ordered by the demand of what I term, through reading Aimé Césaire’s interventions at the level of indigeneity, ‘the cut of the body’ as it is marked both materially and conceptually.