Undoing Apartheid (eBook)

Premesh Lalu is Research Professor and founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Double-binds of Apartheid

Chapter 2: Apartheid's Mythic Precursors

Chapter 3: The Return of Faust: Hyenas, Rats and other Miscreants

Chapter 4: Woyzeck and the Secret Life of Apartheid's Things

Chapter 5: Post-apartheid Slapstick

Chapter 6: The Double Futures of Post-apartheid Freedom

Notes

Bibliography

"In this stunningly original work of intellectual and aesthetic history, Premesh Lalu offers a powerful theory of petty apartheid as a process of deindividuation and objectification through the manipulation of the senses. By excavating the psychotechnics of a century-long biological racism and its revelation in contemporary object-theatre, Lalu's book illuminates a path towards an aesthetic education from which a post-apartheid world can emerge. An extraordinary achievement by South Africa's leading historian and humanist."
Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia

"I read Undoing Apartheid over the weekend - what a fantastic discussion. I've been inspired by it - not only how it reads Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy but the insights into so many other works (the Danby painting included). Building it around the trio of performances works brilliantly: I could understand not only the petty apartheid thesis but also the crucial segue of grand apartheid into techno-capitalism. And I am already borrowing from the discussion of slapstick from the Ubu and the Truth Commission section. It reflects pertinently on the genres which have responded to the parallel situation in Northern Ireland. Abdullah Ibrahim too...superb."
Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College

"[A]n important book, beautifully written, challenging and rewarding."
John K. Noyes in Freund Humanus

"Brilliant and necessary. In this luminous book, Premesh Lalu uncovers the brutal legacies of apartheid's assault on sensual and perceptual life. Only an aesthetic education, he argues, can open up the true hope of post-apartheid future. Written with astute theoretical attentiveness, and with poetry at its heart, Undoing Apartheid is an inspiring blueprint for the aesthetic education it urges. In an era when attacks on the arts and humanities across the world are blatant, Lalu suggests where criticism and creativity might begin again: in Athlone, Cape Town, and in all the other communities across the world where partition and violence have wreaked their worst."
Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees

"a wonderfully provocative and fascinating read"
Garth Stevens, Afrika focus

"Occasionally, an intellectual product sees the light of day which forces the reader to rethink many of their cherished assumptions, thereby providing a new perspective on an old problem. Premesh Lalu's Undoing Apartheid is such a book."
Journal of Asian and African Studies