In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilized in various ways---through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty, and capital---submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism, and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.
List of Illustrations ix
Abbreviations xiii
Prelude: What Remains? xvii
Maps xxvii
Introduction. Detritus in Durban, 2002–2008 1
Part I: Racial Palimpsest
1. Remains of a Camp: Biopolitical Fantasies of a “White Man’s Country,” 1902–1904 33
2. Settlements of Memory: Forgeries of Life in Common, 1900–1930s 61
3. Ruinous Foundations of Progressive Segregation, 1920s–1930s 97
4. The Birth of Biopolitical Struggle, 1940s 133
5. The Science Fiction of Apartheid’s Spatial Fix, 1948–1970s 157
Part II: Remains of Revolution
6. The Theologico-Political Moment, 1970s 197
7. The Insurrectionist Moment: Armed Struggle, 1960s–1980s 227
8. The Moment of Urban Revolution, 1980s 257
9. The Moment of the Disqualified, 1980s–2000s 303
Conclusion. Accumulating Remains, Rhythms of Expectation 339
Coda. Black Atlantic to Indian Ocean: Afrofuture as the Common 345
Acknowledgments 347
Notes 353
Bibliography 403
Index
