Undoing Apartheid
Critical South
1. Auflage November 2022
202 Seiten, Softcover
Lehrbuch
Kurzbeschreibung
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.
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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.
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Double-binds of Apartheid
Chapter 2: Apartheid's Mythic Precursors
Chapter 3: The Return of Faust: Hyenas, Rats and other Miscreants
Chapter 4: Woyzeck and the Secret Life of Apartheid's Things
Chapter 5: Post-apartheid Slapstick
Chapter 6: The Double Futures of Post-apartheid Freedom
Notes
Bibliography
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
