Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid

209 Pages·2009·1.533 MB·English

by  Sarah Nuttall

Entanglement is powerful and persuasive, passionate and perceptive. This
is a major contribution to contemporary literary and cultural studies. While
steeped in the rich particularities and trajectories of change in post-
apartheid urban existence, it addresses the most urgent questions of global
cultural and political formations.
Sarah Nuttall offers her readers new critical vocabularies with which to
grasp the fictions of self-making, the politics and aesthetics of consumption,
and the new and terrifying technologies of the sexualised body. Casting
off the limited frameworks of postcolonial theory, Entanglement is
concerned instead with a politics of the emergent in the Postcolony.
Hazel Carby, Yale University, New Haven
Sarah Nuttall’s book is a welcome addition to South African literary and
cultural studies, taking us in new directions beyond the apartheid and
even standard post-apartheid models. Moving through a variety of settings
and moments both textual and non-textual, it is prepared to take risks in
matters ranging from the ‘citiness’ of Johannesburg, to the recombinatory
qualities of style, to the larger implications of violence in South Africa.
Sometimes provocative, always thoughtful, never less than deeply engaged,
and ultimately quite personal, its series of explorations allow Nuttall to
shed the light of her lively intelligence on some of the intriguing, troubling,
energising, and always complex manifestations of what will now come
under her definition of ‘entanglement’ in an evolving South African world.
Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Other books edited or co-edited by Sarah Nuttall
Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History
in South Africa and Australia (Routledge, 1996)
Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory
in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies
(Oxford University Press, 2000)
Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics
(Duke University Press/ Kwela Books, 2006)
At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa
(Jonathan Ball, 2007)
Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis
(Duke University Press/Wits University Press, 2008)
The manuscript for this book, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural
Reflections on Post-Apartheid, won the University of the Witwatersrand
Research Committee Publication Award in 2008.
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Entanglement
Entanglement
Literary and cultural reflections
on post-apartheid
Sarah Nuttall
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Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
Copyright © Sarah Nuttall 2009
First published 2009
ISBN:978-1-86814-476-1
Earlier versions of chapters in this book have appeared in the following
publications: ‘Entanglement’ as ‘City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South
Africa’ in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2004), ‘Literary City’
in Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and
Achille Mbembe (2008), ‘Secrets and Lies’ as ‘Subjectivities of Whiteness’
in African Studies Review (2001), Self-Styling as ‘Stylizing the Self: The Y
Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg’ in Public Culture (2004) and ‘Girl
Bodies’ in Social Text (2004).
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publisher and the copyright holder.
Cover image adapted from the painting Lasso by Penny Siopis, 2007.
Edited by Pat Tucker
Indexed by Margaret Ramsay
Cover design and typesetting by Crazy Cat Designs
Printing and binding by Paarl Print
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Entanglement
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Entanglement 17
2 Literary City 33
3 Secrets and Lies 58
4 Surface and Underneath 83
5 Self-Styling 108
6 Girl Bodies 132
Conclusion 151
Notes 161
Bibliography 175
Index 192
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Acknowledgements
Frequently, in the writing of a book, a small
group of people become one’s interlocutors.
Those people have been Isabel Hofmeyr, Cheryl-
Ann Michael, Rita Barnard and Achille Mbembe.
My thanks go to Isabel for understanding from
the start what I was trying to do, and edging me
closer to it; Cheryl-Ann, for being my best and
sternest critic; Rita, for her suggestions and
support; and Achille, for always being willing
to talk through with me points of difficulty in
the making of my arguments. More than this, I
thank each of them for the inspiration I have
drawn from their own work, which is evident from
the writing that follows.
Then there is a second circle of people with
whom I have discussed my ideas, drawn from
theirs, and regarded as sounding boards and
shape shifters in my own thinking. These include
my colleagues at WISER, with whom, in the
deepest and most daily of ways, I have been in
conversation, agreement and disagreement.
Deborah Posel has made all of that possible by
imagining into being an intellectual space, WISER,
and by drawing together a group of people with
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Acknowledgements
whom I have been able to have interdisciplinary, provisional, at times heretical,
conversations. My years at WISER have given me room to try out ideas, to
experiment, to speak my mind and to feel at ease and supported by my
colleagues in a way that is hard to imagine to the same degree anywhere else.
I thank Deborah too for the inspiration of her own work. Jon Hyslop’s
work has been very important in helping me think through questions of
race, urban culture and the making of the present in relation to the past.
Irma du Plessis, Tom Odhiambo and Robert Muponde, through their
writing and their conversation, have caused me to constantly rethink the
way I see the world. Liz Gunner has inspired me in numerous ways,
including through her work, and Liz McGregor has taught me a great deal
about how to shape a more public voice for academic work. Ivor Chipkin, Liz
Walker, Marks Chabedi and Nthabiseng Motsemme shared my early years
at WISER and I am grateful to all of them for their insights and their writing.
Ashlee Neser, Michael Titlestad and Pamila Gupta are all hugely valued
colleagues with whom I can talk about anything I happen to be working
on. Lara Allen has been a close friend and a valuable intellectual
interlocutor. I am grateful to Graeme Reid and Julia Hornberger for their
writing, their humour, their comradeship.
Beyond WISER, I thank the following people, with all of whom I have
been in conversation during the years it has taken to produce this book:
Mark Sanders, Penny Siopis, Hazel Carby, Elleke Boehmer, Jean Comaroff,
John Comaroff, Mark Gevisser, Lindsay Bremner, Abdoumaliq Simone,
Carol Breckenridge, Arjun Appadurai, Rob Nixon, Vron Ware, Paul Gilroy,
Louise Bethlehem, Stefan Helgesson, Meg Samuelson, Ian Baucomb, Eric
Worby, Rehana Vally, Emmanuelle Gille, Tawana Kupe, David Goldberg,
Philomena Essed and David Attwell.
Finally, in a fourth circle, I thank people who have influenced me in
more implicit ways, sometimes in direct exchange, or though reading their
work, or simply through knowing them. They are Juan Obarrio, Livio
Sansone, Dominique Malaquais, Peter Geschiere, Ena Jansen, Jennifer
Wenzel, Annie Gagiano, David Bunn, Jane Taylor, Carolyn Hamilton, Dan
Ojwang, John Matshikiza, Njabulo Ndebele, Louise Meintjies, Karin Barber,
Michiel Heyns, Michelle Adler, Denise Newman, Colin Richards, Grace Musila,
Leon de Kock, Natasha Distiller, Pumla Gqola, Sue van Zyl, Khosi Xaba,
Justice Malala, and Fred Khumalo.
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Entanglement
My PhD students, including Robert Muponde, Grace Khunou, the late
Phaswane Mpe, Kgamadi Kometsi, John Montgomery, Zethu Matebeni,
Cobi Labuschagne and Syned Mthatiwa, have been a pleasure to work
with, and it has been very meaningful to me to be contributing to producing
the next generation of young academics in South African universities. I
am very grateful to Veronica Klipp, Estelle Jobson and Melanie Pequeux
at Wits University Press for their openness, efficiency and generosity
during the months of this book’s production.
Circling outside the work of this book, but lodged deeply in my heart,
are Jean and Jolyon, James, Simone, Alice and Zoë.
Achille, Léa and Aniel occupy, like music, a place beyond words and are
my love.
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Acknowledgements