Undoing Apartheid (Critical South)

Post-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it.

In Undoing Apartheid, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth – if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.

Reviews

“Undoing Apartheid offers an unexpected, unorthodox, and deeply rewarding read.”
South African Journal of Science

“The book raises many questions about post-apartheid and postcoloniality, as well as showing in an original way how to address these issues with a different approach and method in addition to existing approaches in the literature.”
African Studies Quarterly
"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

“What politics of knowledge, form of study, mode of education, will get us to the substantive work of undoing apartheid in the present? This is Premesh Lalu’s abiding and forceful question. To get there, we must go back, and deeper, into histories less of grand than of petty apartheid, newly alert now to how the latter both wedged itself in the circuits of sense and perception, he avers. These circuits left little room for escape or desire and found substantive contestation, one we would do well to harness today, Lalu suggests, in a cinematic consciousness, forged from the bioscopes of Athlone in 1985, growing behind the catch-all sociologies of ‘school boycott’ and ‘mass movement’. It was there, via the interval or gap of film form, that thought emerged and forged a mode of freedom to come. This was a sensibility of the after apartheid that, Lalu contends counter-intuitively, was closer to hand than what followed in its aftermath. In this desire was a redistribution of the senses that pointed, and points still, to an education, a form of study, that is able to charge and create the conditions for a freedom which cannot be known in advance. Lalu finds in object theatre a radical play of modes of racialization and freedom that give form to other futures surpassing the circularities of apartheid logics. Although questions of the post-apartheid and of non-racial futures have come under duress in recent critiques, Lalu offers a recalibration of how we might approach aftermath and regeneration and what we might need in order to hear and see their minor keys, potentialities, and entanglement with future time.”
Professor Sarah Nuttall, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research [WISER], University of Witwatersrand