Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall
the rise of new media culture and cultures of consumption. The chapter, called ‘Self-Styling’, aims to show how we might take the surface more seriously in our analyses of contemporary cultural form even where contemporary youth media cultural forms in Johannesburg still signal to and cite the underneath of an apartheid past. In the first part I explore the rise of a youth cultural form widely known as ‘Y Culture’. Y Culture, also known as loxion kulcha, is an emergent youth culture in Johannesburg which moves across various media forms and generates a ‘compositional remixing’ that signals an emergent politics of style, shifting the emphasis away from an earlier era’s resistance politics. It is a culture of the hip bucolic which works across a series of surfaces in order to produce enigmatic and divergent styles of self-making. In the second part I consider a recent set of advertisements that have appeared on billboards and in magazines in the wake of Y Culture, showing how they simultaneously engage with and push in unexpected directions one of the most striking aspects of Y/ loxion culture, an attempt to reread race in the city. In analysing the advertisements I consider ways in which commodity images, and the market itself, produce re-imaginings of race in the city. How to read these commodified versions of entanglement (which are embedded in a much longer history of consumption and its media forms in this country) and what they can tell us about the remaking, or otherwise, of race in the city, is a question the chapter works with in its concluding section.
Chapter Six – ‘Girl Bodies’ – turns to issues of sexuality, and, in particular, to child rape. The chapter draws on an anecdote of a kind: an image, accompanied by a short text in a newspaper, to consider a subject left largely aside in earlier chapters: the question of gender and sexuality in the making of South Africa’s political transition, and of the violence which has emerged, somewhat spectacularly, into the post-apartheid public sphere.7
My account, which is written in the first person, focuses on the manufacture of anti-rape devices for girls and women – new technologies of the sexualised body. Through the telling of a story I explore how technology itself assigns changing meanings to the domains of the public and the private. I draw out, in the chapter, common interest – and trust in technology – among women from different race and ethnic groups – black and white, Tswana and Afrikaner. I explore sets of fantasies about technological solutions in relation to the body which are currently circulating globally but which take on radically local inflections. The chapter considers forms of re-segregation in a wider context of desegregation, and how re-segregation can be based on cross-racial complicities of a kind in a ‘post-racist’ context. In this chapter I subject a notion of entanglement to its limits, while also examining its most disturbing connotations. Examining the concept from the perspective of its outer edges helps to strengthen our understanding of how it works, where it can be useful, and what aporias we need to be alert to.
The chapters draw on a range of critical and writerly vocabularies. They include that which lies dormant in our analysis most of the time, that which offers a singular versus a general view, and the force of the anecdotal, a register of the unexpected in critical orthodoxies. In doing so, they capture something, I hope, of the complex trajectories of change in South Africa, at the level of content but also of form. In what follows I have wanted to speak about the politics of change as well as the ideas and experiences of self which underlie the social; the potential of metropolitan life as well as its foreclosures; the life of the body as well as the mind; cultures of the city as well as feudal imaginaries of the heartland; legacies, as well as contemporary practices, of racial and sexual violence. Put differently, this book explores ways we find of living together, of occupying the city, secrets we keep or tell, the life of the body, our desire for things, the darkness of sex.
CHAPTER 1
Entanglement
Since the political transition in 1994 South African literary and cultural criticism has bifurcated into two distinctive bodies of work. Two dominant responses have emerged, that is, in relation to the dynamics of political change in the country.
The first bifurcation is an idiom produced by critics both inside and outside the country, which could be characterised as neo-Marxist in inflection. Here, the dominant critical impulse has been to assert continuity with the past, producing a critique based on reiteration and return, and an argument in the name of that which has not changed in the country. Such critics employ categories of race, class, domination and resistance in much the same way as critics had done in the decade or so before. Thus, for example, Herman Wasserman and Shaun Jacobs (2003) acknowledge that ‘certain social configurations have started to shift’ but emphasise that the issues of hegemony, resistance and race that marked an earlier critical idiom need to remain at the centre of our critical investigations and that ‘the reaffirmation of the same identities that in the past were discriminated against require our ongoing critical recognition’. Barbara Harlow and David Attwell (2000, p 2) refer to South Africa as ‘a society whose underlying social relations or even attitudes remain substantially unchanged’. Yet, by the time they were writing, South Africa’s black middle class, for example, emerged for the first time as larger than its white middle class, a statistic which contests a stasis in the social structure of South Africa and suggests the emergence of new kinds of imaginaries and practices in the country. Certainly, by the late 1990s neither recent South African fiction nor popular culture suggested social stasis.
Such readings were, to be sure, born in part of what we could refer to as an ethical oppositionality which seeks to register the ongoing ‘agony of the social’ – the continuing inequalities and suffering of many in South Africa since its political transition. This position resonated with a body of work produced during this period by a number of largely ex-South African critics based in the United States and Britain – even while these critics pushed its critical registers somewhat further. In a 2004 special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled ‘After the Thrill is Gone’ and edited by Rita Barnard and Grant Farred, readings of the contemporary South African moment by Neil Lazarus, Grant Farred, Shaun Irlam and others constituted what we could call a narrative of political loss or melancholia.
Loss is expressed in various idioms, chief amongst which is the loss of politics itself – or at least a form of resistance based on mass politics. Thus Neil Lazarus argues that the idea that South Africa is a nation at all is the perpetration of a violence; Grant Farred invokes a disgruntled, historically-enfranchised white subject and a discontented black subject and looks for an oppositional place, the zone of what he calls the ‘not yet political’; while Shaun Irlam finds that ‘the New South Africa has ushered in an era of identity mongering and separate development on a scale that South Africa’s old bosses incessantly promoted at an ideological level’. Grant Farred’s work, in particular, relies on that of Carl Schmitt. Politics, for Schmitt, involves friends and enemies, which means at the very least the centrality of those who are with you and those against whom you struggle. People will, according to Schmitt, only be responsible for who they are if the reality of death and conflict remain present.
This, then, constitutes the first critical moment adopted by literary scholars in response to the demise of apartheid and to its aftermath – a political and critical mode which I have characterised as one of reiteration and return. A second critical moment approaches the prognostics of change in terms of a representational shift, according to a more future-inflected politics. In order to approach an as yet nameless present, scholars have tried to propose and shape expanded critical vocabularies. Among them are Leon de Kock, who argues for a notion of ‘the seam’ (an idea he draws from Noel Mostert’s book Frontiers) to denote the place where difference and sameness are hitched together – where they are brought to self-awareness, denied, or displaced into third terms; Michael Titlestad, who, analysing jazz representation in literature and reportage, concerns himself with forms of epistemological itinerancy, with ‘transverse drifts through a set of theoretical possibilities’; Mark Sanders’s notion of complicity as marking the limits of a theory of ‘apartness’ and Isabel Hofmeyr, whose interest is in tracking the ‘post-resistance’ formations which traverse neo-Marxist and nationalist accounts of literary and cultural work in this country.
Precursors of these critical positions include my argument with Cheryl-Ann Michael (2000),