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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | When was South African history ever postcolonial |
Author: | Lalu, Premesh |
Year: | 2008 |
Periodical: | Kronos: Journal of Cape History |
Issue: | 34 |
Pages: | 267-281 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | historiography social history apartheid |
External link: | http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/kronos/v34n1/v34n1a11.pdf |
Abstract: | There is a belief among some historians that South African history is already postcolonial because it has been analytically decolonized. The claim, it seems, is made in relation to the rise of social history in analyses of the South African social formation, especially the way in which it supposedly exceeded the constraints of colonialism, segregation and apartheid on questions of subjectivity. By focusing on social forces and class consciousness this 1980s critique redirected the liberal/Marxist preoccupations with subjective interpellation towards a less determinate narrative of historical change. The present author argues that what enabled affiliation to the larger political project against apartheid was precisely the production of a subject that was always threaded through a structure of racial capitalism. This hinders the emergence of a history of colonialism and nationalism that theorizes and historicizes the relations of knowledge and power. In a 'postcolonial critique of apartheid', the author makes explicit the way the question of knowledge and power was often exchanged for historicist constructions of historical change, especially in relation to the transition from the apartheid to the postapartheid. Tangential to his argument is a reminder of the way the native question in the first half of the 20th century produced a disciplinary upheaval in South African knowledge projects by combining the impulses drawn from colonial discourse and nationalist anticolonial narration. Herein the problem of South African radical historiography may be encountered, and its concomitant constructions of the postapartheid. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |