Entanglement is powerful and persuasive, passionate and perceptive. This is a major contribution to contemporary literary and cultural studies. While steeped in the rich particularities and trajectories of change in post-apartheid urban existence, it addresses the most urgent questions of global cultural and political formations.
Sarah Nuttall offers her readers new critical vocabularies with which to grasp the fictions of self-making, the politics and aesthetics of consumption, and the new and terrifying technologies of the sexualised body. Casting off the limited frameworks of postcolonial theory, Entanglement is concerned instead with a politics of the emergent in the Postcolony.
Hazel Carby, Yale University, New Haven
Sarah Nuttall’s book is a welcome addition to South African literary and cultural studies, taking us in new directions beyond the apartheid and even standard post-apartheid models. Moving through a variety of settings and moments both textual and non-textual, it is prepared to take risks in matters ranging from the ‘citiness’ of Johannesburg, to the recombinatory qualities of style, to the larger implications of violence in South Africa. Sometimes provocative, always thoughtful, never less than deeply engaged, and ultimately quite personal, its series of explorations allow Nuttall to shed the light of her lively intelligence on some of the intriguing, troubling, energising, and always complex manifestations of what will now come under her definition of ‘entanglement’ in an evolving South African world.
Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Other books edited or co-edited by Sarah Nuttall
Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (Routledge, 1996)
Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (Duke University Press/ Kwela Books, 2006)
At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Jonathan Ball, 2007)
Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis (Duke University Press/Wits University Press, 2008)
The manuscript for this book, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid, won the University of the Witwatersrand Research Committee Publication Award in 2008.
Entanglement
Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid
Sarah Nuttall
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
Copyright © Sarah Nuttall 2009
First published 2009
ISBN:978-1-86814-476-1
Earlier versions of chapters in this book have appeared in the following publications: ‘Entanglement’ as ‘City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa’ in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2004), ‘Literary City’ in Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (2008), ‘Secrets and Lies’ as ‘Subjectivities of Whiteness’ in African Studies Review (2001), Self-Styling as ‘Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg’ in Public Culture (2004) and ‘Girl Bodies’ in Social Text (2004).
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the copyright holder.
Cover image adapted from the painting Lasso by Penny Siopis, 2007.
Edited by Pat Tucker
Indexed by Margaret Ramsay
Cover design and typesetting by Crazy Cat Designs
Printing and binding by Paarl Print
Contents
Acknowledgements
Frequently, in the writing of a book, a small group of people become one’s interlocutors. Those people have been Isabel Hofmeyr, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Rita Barnard and Achille Mbembe. My thanks go to Isabel for understanding from the start what I was trying to do, and edging me closer to it; Cheryl-Ann, for being my best and sternest critic; Rita, for her suggestions and support; and Achille, for always being willing to talk through with me points of difficulty in the making of my arguments. More than this, I thank each of them for the inspiration I have drawn from their own work, which is evident from the writing that follows.
Then there is a second circle of people with whom I have discussed my ideas, drawn from theirs, and regarded as sounding boards and shape shifters in my own thinking. These include my colleagues at WISER, with whom, in the deepest and most daily of ways, I have been in conversation, agreement and disagreement. Deborah Posel has made all of that possible by imagining into being an intellectual space, WISER, and by drawing together a group of people with whom I have been able to have interdisciplinary, provisional, at times heretical, conversations. My years at WISER have given me room to try out ideas, to experiment, to speak my mind and to feel at ease and supported by my colleagues in a way that is hard to imagine to the same degree anywhere else.
I thank Deborah too for the inspiration of her own work. Jon Hyslop’s work has been very important in helping me think through questions of race, urban culture and the making of the present in relation to the past. Irma du Plessis, Tom Odhiambo and Robert Muponde, through their writing and their conversation, have caused me to constantly rethink the way I see the world. Liz Gunner has inspired me in numerous ways, including through her work, and Liz McGregor has taught me a great deal about how to shape a more public voice for academic work. Ivor Chipkin, Liz Walker, Marks Chabedi and Nthabiseng Motsemme shared my early years at WISER and I am grateful to all of them for their insights and their writing. Ashlee Neser, Michael Titlestad and Pamila Gupta