Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall

      Introduction

      Entanglement is a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with; it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored or uninvited. It is a term which may gesture towards a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness.¹ It works with difference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their moments of complication. It is a concept I find deeply suggestive for the kinds of arguments I want to make in relation to the post-apartheid present, in particular its literary and cultural formations. So often the story of post-apartheid has been told within the register of difference – frequently for good reason, but often, too, ignoring the intricate overlaps that mark the present and, at times, and in important ways, the past, as well.

      Entanglement is an idea that has been explored by scholars in anthropology, history, sociology and literary studies, although always briefly and in passing rather than as a structuring concept in their work. I want to draw it from the wings and place it where we can see it more clearly, and consider that it might speak with a tongue more fertile than we had imagined, with nuances often uncaught or left latent in what may constitute a critical underneath, or sub-terrain. In the South African context which I will examine here, the term carries perhaps its most profound possibilities in relation to race – racial entanglement – but it brings with it, too, other registers, ways of being, modes of identity-making and of material life.

      Below I outline six ways in which the term has been interpreted, explicitly or implicitly, by others. I spend some time on this, since these are complex ideas, ideas which signal a number of important intellectual pathways forged in recent years in African studies and beyond. Thereafter, I explain how I think of the term, bringing to it my own inflections, and explaining why it is an appropriate structuring idea for the book as a whole.

      The first rubric under which the term has been used is in relation to a process of historical entanglement. As early as 1957 the liberal historian, C W de Kiewiet (1957), suggested that the deepest truth of South African history, and one often elided by later historians, is that the more dispossession occurred the more blacks and whites depended on each other. There was an intricate entanglement on the earliest colonial frontiers: accompanying whites’ search for land was the process of acquiring labour and, in this process, whites became dependent on blacks, and blacks on whites. Precisely as this dependency grew, so whites tried to preserve their difference through ideology – racism. The implications of De Kiewiet’s argument (p 48) that ‘the conflict of black and white was fed more by their similarities than by their differences’ is that the emergence and articulation of racial difference was, in this context, a symptom of loss (loss of independence through increasing dependence on black labour) – but a loss that most whites on the early frontier refused to embrace.

      Much more recently, Carolyn Hamilton (1998) has argued that categories and institutions forged under colonial rule should not be viewed as the wholesale creation of white authorities but as the result of ‘the complex historical entanglement of indigenous and colonial concepts’ (pp 3-4). By focusing on how disparate concerns were drawn together and, over time, became entangled, this approach enables us to elucidate the diverse and shifting interests that fuelled colonial politics, and to reveal that it was never simply about colonial subjugation and anti-colonial resistance. Rather, it entailed the uneven mixing and reformulation of local and imperial concerns. Lynn Thomas’s (2003) work is part of a growing literature, mainly focused on medicine and domesticity, that analyses the history of the body in Africa as a story of wide-ranging struggles over wealth, health and power – and how such struggles connected and combined the material and the moral, the indigenous and the imperial, the intimate and the global. Thomas’s work on reproduction and the politics of the womb in Kenya emphasises entanglement as against two earlier approaches to the topic: the first, she shows, is the ‘breakdown of tradition’ approach, which sees colonialism as a clash of two radically different worldviews, one African and one European, resulting in the ultimate triumph of the latter (such arguments resonate with social scientific theories of ‘modernisation’). The second emphasises the power of colonial discourses and categories, largely at the expense of exploring the impact of colonialism on its subjects, and the perspectives and experiences of colonial subjects (pp 17-19).

      Isabel Hofmeyr (2004), in her work on the history of the book, argues that rigid distinctions between ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’ are increasingly misleading. Unravelling the simplifying dualisms of ‘centre/periphery’ and ‘colonised/coloniser’ Hofmeyr weaves, instead, an imaginary structured by circuits, layering, webs, overlapping fields and transnational networks. Texts, like identities, do not, she argues (p 30), travel one way – from centre to periphery, for instance – but in ‘bits and pieces’ and through many media, transforming in many settings and places, and convening numerous different publics at different points in what Appadurai (1986) has referred to as their ‘social lives’.

      Hofmeyr is interested in diasporic histories, moving between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States, and her work constitutes a web versus an avowedly national intellectual formation. Hofmeyr’s web, carrying with it the notion of interlacing, an intricacy of pattern or circumstance, a membrane that connects, is an entanglement of historical space and time. If she looks at shared fields of discourse and exchange, at ‘intellectual convergences’ (p 17), she also considers the conditions under which such formations are rejected, terminated or evaporate, becoming ‘meaningless or unintelligible’ (p 15). In this case, modes of translatability and entanglement become short-lived, spectral.

      The second major rubric invoking the term is temporal. Achille Mbembe (2001, p 14) has written about the time of entanglement, arguing that, as an age, the postcolony ‘encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another: an entanglement’. Mbembe argues that there is no way to give a plausible account of the time of entanglement without asserting three postulates: firstly, that this time is ‘not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous ones’. Secondly, that it is made up of ‘disturbances, of a bundle of unforeseen events’. Thirdly, that close attention to ‘its real patterns