I begin with an autobiographical chapter as an opening to my lived experience of a particular non-hegemonic way of giving meaning to blackness. ‘This Blackness’ shows the ways in which history, politics and theory are embedded in and integral to biography. I give readers a sense of the place from which I write, think and (try to) act – a place constituted by a web of multiple thresholds and moulded by four globally significant historical conjunctures: South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts, its transition to democracy in April 1994, and its increasingly complex post-1994 reality. This first chapter reveals what has become for me, in this moment, a place of critique from which I attempt to live (not always with success) alongside racialised prescriptions of history and of the present.
I include family photographs in my book as a way of bringing to life particular aspects of this autobiographical chapter. While I am aware of critical scholarship on the production and use of family photo albums, particularly the positioning of intimate relations as Other, I do not engage this literature here.2 Suffice it to say that this awareness is amplified by my critique of ‘the look’ as a normative practice of racialisation. Given that the book as a whole provides a context for this selection of photographs, I leave it to readers to be conscious of what it is they ‘look for’ and what it is they ‘look at’ when engaging with the photographs.
Chapters two through six are the core of this text. In ‘A Conversation’ I begin by outlining a frame – provided by the poet and literary scholar, Harry Garuba (2008) – for thinking about race and Africa. Garuba considers the uses of the modern idea of race in Africa, responses to these uses of race, and their implications for racialised consciousness. In the remainder of this chapter, I digest yesterday’s thought and practice in order to nourish new modes of each. Here I highlight some of the first subaltern histories of and intellectual responses from South Africa to colonial uses of race. I show the kinds of questions that Garuba’s frame enables when thinking about counter-discourses to race in South Africa. This provides a backdrop against which I locate this book in relation to particular political and intellectual traditions.
In the chapters that follow – ‘The Look’, ‘The Category’ and ‘The Gene’ – I reveal the ways in which these normative ways of knowing translate into practices of racialisation. Each chapter delineates the contours of the place where the subject’s capacity to change these racialising practices chafes against the rough edges of taken-for-granted ways of knowing and of working with race. The space inside these contours is where the subject opens up to other orders of making meaning of race, where old logics of race rub up against new logics to create productive tensions that are negotiated with a double politics. Inside each of these spaces, which I visualise as cocoons, an other way of coming to know and of coming to engage with race – through adversarial manoeuvres, creolisation, sociogenesis – emerges from these tensions. This is where new ways of coming to know are inevitably forged and where history is made.
Chapter six, ‘Beginnings’, links four elements of normative and genealogical knowing, and at the same time suggests elements of sociogenesis as a way of coming to know otherwise. The first of these four elements is concerned with what Tim Ingold calls ‘occupant knowledge’ (the knowledge of imperial powers); its cocooning space offers ‘inhabitant knowledge’ (coming to know generated from the inside of the social world) (Ingold 2007: 81-89). The second element represents the old and recently recuperated concern (if not obsession) with ‘origins’; its cocoon offers ‘beginnings’ as a way of coming to know otherwise. The third represents customary ways of knowing that are presented to us as ‘new truths’; its cocoon offers journeys towards ‘the possible’. The fourth element represents ‘genealogical sequences’; its cocoon generates ‘sociogenic wayfaring’ as a way of coming to know otherwise.
The four normative ways of knowing presented in this chapter are integral to processes of racialisation. If, in the words of Michael J. Monahan (2011: 114), ‘we not only approach the world from somewhere but also toward somewhere’, then each of the four ways of coming to know that emerge in the cocoons of this chapter inspires a located orientation towards a world in which processes of racialisation are deprived of their ‘lethal cling’ (Morrison 1997: 5). ‘Inhabitant knowledge’, ‘beginnings’, ‘the possible’ and ‘sociogenic wayfaring’ depend upon eros: a register of love as a force for social change; a register of love as a political praxis. The Moroccan scholars and activists Abdelkebir Khatibi and Ghita El Khayat call this register of love aimance (El Khayat and Khatibi 2010). Aimance enables humaning as a political praxis imbued with will and with emotion. Humaning is a historically located and an open process of social interdependence. Humaning is arabesque in its praxis.
I end this book on a note which is intended to open up to radical change, to difficult conversations and to a possible future without ‘the look’, without race classification and without genetic ancestry tests as practices of racialisation. This note is an invitation to new beginnings for thought and for practice.
1
This Blackness
Instead of denying history and fabricating a totalising colouredness, ‘multiple belongings’ can be seen as an alternative way of viewing a culture where participation in a number of coloured micro-communities whose interests conflict and overlap could become a rehearsal of cultural life in the larger South African community where we learn to perform the same kind of negotiations in terms of identity within a lived culture characterised by difference.
ZOE WICOMB
‘Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa’, 1998
... the meaning and significance of whiteness (and blackness) within a given polity at a given time [matters] ... why. take the dominant [meaning] to be definitive .
MICHAEL J. MONAHAN
The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity, 2011
MY BLACKNESS IS SUPPOSEDLY visible only because I do not ‘look white’.1 But, in some parts of West Africa I am called white. My blackness is ambiguous because I am not black Black or black African. These descriptions are increasingly used to distinguish between formerly colonised South Africans with different historical relationships to this region and its colonial past. I am (more often than not) not considered African in South Africa. I am still called ‘Coloured’.2 In the Western and Eastern Cape provinces ‘what I am’, racially speaking, is seldom questioned. In Limpopo, Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the northern provinces of the country, I am asked which tribe and which country I am from. In parts of Europe I am assumed to be from a Caribbean island. African-Americans are surprised to find that I was born and live ‘in Africa’. People from different parts of the world ask ‘what mix’ I am. Which would you prefer? Salt and vinegar or cinnamon and sugar? Neither one of my parents was black Black. Neither one of them was white White.3 I am not half-and-half.
FAMILY STORIES
The anthropologist Tim Ingold borrows the term ‘meshworks’ from Henri Lefebvre to refer to reticulate lines of journey, not ‘networks’ or lines of ‘getting-there’ that connect points as destinations (Ingold 2007: 81-84, 2012: 206). Some of my own sensibilities are beautifully expressed in his writing:
Launched upon the tides of history, we have to cling to things, hoping that the friction of our contact will somehow suffice to countervail the currents that would otherwise sweep us to oblivion ... in holding on to one another – lies the very essence of sociality ... Nothing can hold on unless it puts out a line, and unless that line can tangle with others. When everything tangles with everything