Empire and Nation

Premesh Lalu

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2015, vol. 41, issue 3, 437-450

Abstract: In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitics of apartheid was not merely a reaction to the setting sun of the British Empire, or the dissolution of liberal reason. It was, as I will show, a response to the very question of political subjectivity in liberal discourse. Biopolitics, in contrast to ideological racism, demands a reading of empire that advances and elaborates a concept of the post-apartheid. To this end, earlier critical models that were applied to readings of empire specifically locate empire's force in imperial war or the ravages of imperialism. Perhaps such critiques may be productively enlivened by a demand to keep the desire for the post-apartheid in sight. To the extent that empire always also reveals itself as the story of the postcolonial nation, might the intended critique of the South African empire afford us an opportunity to think our way out of the tragic scripts of the 19th and 20th centuries?

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2015.1025336 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:41:y:2015:i:3:p:437-450

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2015.1025336

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().