"The future Must Be Made in the Present" --- Notes on Biko by Jess Auerbach

Reflections on Kelly Gillespie’s Presentation ‘The Trouble with Non-racialism’ given at the Steve Biko Center in Ginsberg, South Africa, as part of the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism.

JWTC participant walking in the fading light of dusk to Steve Biko's grave in Ginsberg (c) Ainehi Edoro

On Voice

It begins with voice, rolling out over a still image and a still room, conscious of certain irony but nonetheless aware of the importance today of listening.

To Biko’s voice. So often we speak his words, read them, articulate them – but in our voices. And here is his.

It is in Ginsberg that this history began, and in Ginsberg that this sound enters the air, is absorbed into ears and through carpets and down into the ground of this place through pens and keyboards and multiple spatial recorders.

People are different, he tells us, and that’s fine, but to fail to see that difference and act with it in mind is a failure of humanity.

On the Future

We must prepare for a future in which things will be not as they are, Biko says. The question enters the air: which future are we preparing for now? It percolates with urgency, and we are all drawn in, because today the reality is that little has substantively changed.

And in the commodification and brandification of Biko’s face and voice and concepts, we find an echo of a failing of a future – the failing of the future that was dreamed and yet is yet to come.

“The sign of Biko then and now is the sign of the unfinished business of racism,” Gillespie says with calm intensity. To ignore this sign is to miss a vital marker of where and what we as a nation and a place of global movements are feeling. The future must be made in the present and the present is a national project of various exclusions.

On the Present National Project

And so the question, in this place at this time, becomes about the present to my ears. How do we enact a conscious humanity cognizant of the past but seeking to surpass it in the everyday minutiae of living? Herein lies the urgency.

Can race be surpassed in our daily lives lived now? What might that mean in coming tomorrows? Where in the grist of profound present inequality and fear are the moments where the non and the anti and the a-  of racialism are transcended through the simple experiences of living, listening and speaking together? Listening and to hearing and to voicing in South Africa as we go forward, attended and in constant dialogue with that which is outside of us, beyond us, and witnessing.

Surrealism takes us beyond the ‘sordid antimonies’of our task. It is presented as a tool of transcendence, and we closed the meditation on Biko with that as an offering from Suzanne Césaire: “Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder’s blue flame. We shall recover our value as metal, as the cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions.”
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About the Author: 

Jess Auerbach is originally from Durban, but did her undergrad at the University of Cape Town where she began working with refugees from around the continent. Her current work at Stanford University considers the ways in which circulation within the former Portuguese empire continues to inform Angola's post-war development.

Twitter: @jess.auerbach

Cities of Migration and Contradictions by Gcobani Qambela

Michael Keith's lecture in session at the BAT Center, Durban, South Africa

The past week travelling by the “Thought Bus” through Johannesburg, Swaziland, Durban and now the Eastern Cape has been incredibly enriching not only in terms of the scenic drives and views, but also the intellectual stimulation. Yet, it was hard to not notice the contradictions of these cities, starting with Johannesburg, ‘the city of gold,’ where only a few actually benefit from its riches. But then there is also Swaziland where some people feel censored by the government and Durban where poverty, deprivation and opulence often stand side by side.

Yet, despite many challenges that cities often face, for many people the city still represents some hope particularly in offering economic opportunity and ‘work’. It is in this fashion that Micheal Keith delivered his talk on the theme of ‘The Right to Have Rights in Cities of Migration’. The talk focused on five main themes:

1.     Austerity politics and historicisation of neoliberalism,

2.     City rights and property rights,

3.     The city commons, Insurgent informality and institutional forms,

4.     And, new forms of urban participation.

Keith notes that his works emerges our of a dissatisfaction with the ways in which race and class are looked at particularly as it relates to the right to the city. He is interested in looking at the ways in which “the empire strikes back” and particularly inspired by Raj Patel's work on shack dwellers (anti)evictions movements and other studies that illuminates the circuit of realizing the right to the city.

For Keith, it is important to ask: ‘who is displaced in the city?’ and ‘who belongs?’ To address this question, we need to take into account the tensions between the political economy and theory. He says in order to understand the neoliberal processes that result in so many people being excluded from the city, we need to understand neoliberalism (‘the beast’) as well as understand its genealogy.

I found Keith's idea that urban spaces should accommodate future planets particularly striking. It reminded of the old proverb:“We do not inherit the Earth from our parents; we borrow it from our children”. As Keith noted, the city (and planet I would argue) belongs not only to people who are alive now, but also those who will constitute the city in the future which will include those that are dislocated economically by surplus.

I was also taken by Keith’s idea of the ‘arrival’ (into the city), temporarility and the disorientating effect that this has on the (im)possibility of being able to dwell in the city. We need to ask and think about “where the neoliberal movement comes from” and the relationship between power, people and property for it is here that institutional rights play against race and class.

Yet, while in many ways illuminating, it was disappointing that the presentation was UK/East London focused for the most part especially since it was taking place in South Africa. South Africa is somewhat peculiar when it comes to land and property issue because the land (along with the economy) is owned by a white minority although the bill of rights in South Africa stipulates that everyone should have access to property, land and economic participation. This shows the limitations of legal rights without sufficient substantive application, that even property rights are not enough if they are not applied and reach people at the ground level.

On our way to Keith’s talk on the ‘Thought Bus,’ we passed a group of about five homeless people who were being removed by police for sleeping on the city center. This is what Keith called ‘the economization of everyday life’ and has a lot of implications for what we then understand to be the ‘non-racial’ and what rethinking and reshaping has to be done to get there.

But we also have to think about who will do this rethinking? Will it be an all-inclusive community-wide process or will it be a few policy makers? What will be the (re)gendering of social relations that the new cities will have to do? Ultimately I agree with Keith’s conclusion that we should not let economics continue to override the law. Our future cities will be shaped by the decisions we take now and those will also ultimately dictate which way the non-racialism project goes.

Images by Naadira Patel. 

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About the Author: 
Gcobani Qambela is a graduate student in Anthropology at Rhodes University. He currently works on cultural masculinities, HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health.

Follow on Twitter: @GcobaniQambela

Instagram: GcobaniQambela

Race, Genomic Science, and the Meaning of Ancestry by Elliot James

If at one point it was clear that race is a social construction, this is no longer the case. As Dr. Ruha Benjamin explained in her presentation, “Can the Subaltern Genome Code?” genomics has brought back ethno-racial categories in a big way.
Benjamin clearly lays out the stakes in genomic scientific projects and shows how elites in India, Mexico, South Africa (once sites of colonization) are at the forefront of using science to determine what makes their populations unique biologically. As post-colonial scientists have argued, Genomics enables their nations, as opposed to the pharmaceutical giants in the North (i.e. the former colonizers), to exploit subaltern gene pools for profit.

Genomicists in the global south have now sought to develop medicines tailored to treat diseases specific to their local populations, rather than have outsiders make money doing that work for them.
What Benjamin puts on the table is the way post-colonial genomics needs race to be fixed and objective in order to serve capitalism and nationalism well.

But what else is it about the genome, as opposed to something else, that gives it the potential to reify the racial? And how might we begin to reframe the very categories genomics has deemed natural in order to advance an anti-racist politics?

It is useful to pose these questions in Africa, not just because it is the place where genomicists continue to locate “First Man,” but also because querying genomics here exposes the limit of the project of ancestry (africanancestry.com). As much as what the genome reveals about our great-great grandparents, it tells us nothing of the ancestors.

What elders, griots, and praise poets have taught us across the African diaspora, for example, is that past peoples need not be located and extracted through the scientific method or historical inquiry to be engaged or remembered. Rather, our ancestors are already amongst us—guiding and teaching us. So, how do we invoke the ancestors in the age of ancestry?

The ancestors made themselves present when Dr. Benjamin invited spoken word artist and fellow JWTC participant Roberta Estrela D’Alva to lead the group in song. We banged on chairs and desks, clapped and snapped, stomped our feet, and sang in response to the call of D’Alva’s voice.
I had no clue what the words we sang meant, and I sat amongst people who did not look like me, but drumming and singing in chorus with everyone in the room felt like church to me. It transported me to the Church of the New Vision, where I once communed every Sunday with folks I no longer see—some of whom have passed away.

Though our ancestries differed, Benjamin, D’Alva, and the people in the room that day invoked my ancestors, and I have no doubt that mine sang, drummed, and danced with theirs. We might very well need to continuously find ways to invoke the ancestors as we journey through the country and theorize the “non-racial” if only to contest the ways ancestry has reinscribed the racial in this post-genomic era.

The image is under a Creative Common License: (c) Victoria Pickering via Flickr

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About the Author:

Elliot James is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota and studies the history of technology in Africa from a “queer of color” perspective. He is currently writing a thesis that retells the history of South Africa’s minibus taxi in order to que(e)ry the nature and consequences of transport reform.

Twitter @elliot_mpls

The Secret Life of Bananas by Federico Navarrete

Banana is a commonplace fruit. It is ubiquitous, tasty, and quite easy to eat. But behind this facade of banality---safely hidden within thick peels---lies a perturbing history of global capitalism, racial oppression and gender discrimination. 

Françoise Verges's presentation at the 2014 Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism is a brilliant exposition of this unsettling history of capital and violence that lurks behind the banana. 

The banana is one of the oldest cultivated fruits in the world. It originated in New Guinea and spread to South Asia and Africa thousands of years ago. In the 16^th century, it was brought to the Americas, alongside millions of African slaves captured by European colonial powers and forced to work in plantations. 

Ever since then, bananas have become an essential part of life in the West and of modern consumer culture. However, the consumer’s right to enjoy this fruit has always been attained at the cost of subjugating the laborers who produced them---laborers ranging from African slaves and indigenous workers in the Americas to indentured laborers across the Indian ocean.

In some ways, the development of labor and capital in the west requires an examination of the rise of banana as a stable commodity. The industrialization of banana in the 20^th century brought about a new wave of labor migration accompanied by racist segregation and exploitation that forced female, male and child workers to work in terrible conditions with little rights. It also engendered a new kind of colonialism centered on the Banana Republic and new forms of ecologic devastation due to the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

In the West, these contradictions have been rendered largely invisible thanks to well-funded advertisement campaigns that seek to dissociate the fruit from its origins and to peel off the layers of race and class and gender, including political and environmental imperialism that allow its production. These kinds of campaigns are rendered all the more powerful because they draw on sexual tropes that associate the fruit with blackness, the feminine body, and the tropics. Banana has, thus, become feminized and linked to Latino sensuality.

By examining such an everyday object, such a commonplace article of food through a critical lens, Francois Verges reveals the hidden networks that shape our world and define our lives in such contradictory and unequal ways, hence giving some the privilege of consuming fruits produced half a world away, while demeaning the lives of many others, generally those with darker skin, often women. Add to this the fact that entire islands such as Martinique and Guadaloupe in the Caribbean are left with land that can no longer be cultivated as a result of pesticide use and other harmful agricultural practices. 

In referring to banana as a "strange fruit," Verges evokes an iconic expression of anti-racism. "Strange Fruit" is a song originally written as a poem and then set to music by Abel Meeropol but later popularized by Billie Holiday.  The song is itself an attempt to express the horrors of black male lynching in Southern USA. 

By evoking the image of banana as a "strange fruit," Verges makes the point that a fruit as innocuous as the banana can be redolent of exploitation, racism and sexism that haunt our world just as the stench of death pervaded the nights of the racist South.

The image is under a Creative Common License: (c) Jo Christian Oterhals via Flickr

About the Author: 

Federico Navarrete is a Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has also written many books for young readers, including novels about the conquest of Mexico and the interaction between Amerindians, Africans and Europeans through their supernatural beings and beliefs. The title of his latest novel is Nahuales contra vampiros.

Follow him on Twitter: @Fedenavarrete

The Politics of Invisibility and the Pedagogy of the Archive by Alexandre White

I am conscious of a certain pressure before me in attempting to archive our panel discussion on our final night in Swaziland. It became quickly apparent that what we were witnessing, in the testimonials and histories of the four Swazi representatives, an encounter with the practice of archiving. 

All the contestations, fragmentations, and obfuscations of the archival project were laid bare for all to see in the vulnerabilities and problematics of the panelists. This I believe provides an interesting opportunity to discuss certain pedagogical questions of the archive as well as the importance of representation.

The complexities of everyday life exposed in the retelling of these varied experiences highlight the contrasting modes of living through unsettled times.

 As was told to us, the possibilities for public expression and freedom of the press in Swaziland are diminishing. The realities of this situation make the careful consideration of its archive even more critical.

Censorship is a great danger to the archival project as it disciplines the act of putting pen to paper making an engagement with the archive all the more difficult. Such actions also render histories that may enliven the archive invisible to dominant practices of academic research.

In the imagining of the archive we must also be mindful of how that archive is retaught and replicated in discussion and education as well as the limitations of teaching from the perspective of complete knowledge, or as Francoise Vergés has put it, a project of omnipotence.

In assuming omnipotence or in its pursuit, we can so often gloss over that which the archive has made invisible. The Panel represented four vastly contrasting views on everyday life in Swaziland. However, as many pointed out, there were conspicuous absences of certain voices that were discussed but not seen. Several of the panelists presented a narrative that depicted Swaziland as a relatively untroubled space of interracial sexual exchange.

Digging beyond the opinions of these few, how might the understandings and particularities of this moment be changed by interventions and testimonials of black men and women who also loved across racial lines? How might the ethnomethodological practice of archiving unearth these histories made invisible by social forces and what are the stakes of leaving such questions uncontested? Also, what sorts of questions arise from the fact that two of the three members of the panel active in the anti-apartheid struggle were women? How does this exposure recontextualize questions of activism and revolutionary struggle?

I'd like to end with the question that Gabeba Baderoon left us with during the panel---what do we make of the way that South Africa forms the point around which the archives of frontier states must pivot?

The theme of the panel concerned places of refuge from Apartheid. Such a question, though fascinating, positions Swaziland and its history secondary to the concerns of South Africa.  Rather than directly answer Gabeba’s question, I want to introduce an element we may not have explored yet---how we approach the archive as a pedagogical project.

The process of archival recovery is not only about unearthing contested knowledges and searching for that which has disappeared. The wherewithal to ask the right questions that attest to such a project also requires keen sharpening of the analytic mind to recognize the questions that may retrieve such knowledge.  

While we may pursue our own reparative archival projects, a pedagogical process of training must also occur so as not to gloss over or render invisible those actors whose role in the archive have been so mindfully and unmindfully misrepresented and repressed.   

 All images by Tana Nolethu Forrest. 

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About the Author

Alexandre White is a Martin Luther King Jr. Fellow and Graduate Student at Boston University. He studies race theories within the context of postcolonial theory and medical sociology. 

Follow him on Twitter: @RhizomeNomad

The Enigma of Our Swaziland Arrival by Ainehi Edoro

 A mobile conference is a peculiar kind of intellectual labor. It presents the image of the intellectual not as a solitary and sedentary thinker but as an errant being, plagued by the inconveniences of thinking on the move.

In past years, the scene of our intellectual labor has always been the room at Wits University. This year, we are on the road, 60 of us in a tour bus, checking in and out of hotels, sharing the communion of food and libations, and arriving at venues where we perform a series of acts that constitutes the academic subject—thinking and speaking and questioning. 

Are we tourists? 

Kelly Gillespie warned us to reject the naïve sentiment of the tourist. Yes we were assembled in a place called the Valley of Heaven, with mountain peaks adorning its horizon. The night before, we marveled at the cute African huts where we warmed our cold and tired limbs before a bonfire, in the midst of warthogs and starry skies. But the serenity, Gillespie warns, is at best dubious and at worst seduces us from the work at hand---giving account of a history of violence that is both elusive and painfully present. 

Are we explorers? 

This year’s workshop is a pursuit of “creative theoretical thought” by way of a movement through space. We are asking questions about race, history, and the future as we move from city to city. It is a project where the exploration of ideas coincides with the exploration of space. 

In a colonial expedition headed by an explorer figure, the objective of mobility is the removal of obstacles or impediment—as in the freeing of the feet from fetters evident in the Latin roots of the word—expedire. The explorer is one for whom knowledge is tied to an overcoming of space. 

The movement of the modern explorer is also destinational. Space is reducible to extension and movement is progressive. The explorer works within a dialectics of departure and arrival enabling him to observe, record, and map---to abstract space.  This is because the aim of the explorer is to constitute space as something that can then be transformed into a home or a market. 

If travel means, for the explorers, the clearing away of obstacles, and invariably the appropriation of space as something either known or owned, I want to imagine our journey ever since the bus left Johannesburg as something different, perhaps, as a “traveller’s tale…set in a surrealist painting.” 

Our project consciously attempts to interrupt the touristic gaze that assumes effortless consumption as its right and the explorer’s feet that removes the impediments on which the creative and ethical imperative of our work depends. Instead, through a careful process of curation, our project constellates a series of spaces, peoples, movements, encounters, to allow a different mode of engagement that questions knowledge acquisition, production, and assumption. 

Unlike the explorer, we are open to the possibility that certain encounters will prevent out capacity to move on. This is what the Swaziland experience has meant for many of us. Wopko Jensma’s work, coupled with the testimonies of those six individuals has stayed with us. Something happened in that space. Some of us are still not able to name it and, for that reason, we will never be able to move on from it. In a sense, we have never left Swaziland. 

If we have still not left Swaziland, have we yet arrived anywhere else? Might it be that the beauty of our project derives from the impossibility of departure and arrival? Another way to put this is to ask whether we will ever be able to return to the Johannesburg that we left a few days ago? Will this repetition of failed departures and arrivals bring us to a different Johannesburg? 

There is a dimension of our journey where mobility is neither progressive nor digressive. With Siba Grovogui's talk we found ourselves transported through time and space to the Straits of Malacca. After Swaziland, we have still not been able to move on. We have been held captive by a gut-wrenching scene of testimony. This oscillation between incalculable speed (the Straits of Malacca) and immobility (Swaziland) defines the alien form of mobility essential to our project. 

We are moving in thought and thinking in movement. But it also seems as though we are doomed to a form of mobility consisting of repetitions of impasses and errancy. 

Could this alien technique of intellectual labor called "the mobile workshop" be itself a manifestation of the non-racial?

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Images by Naadira Patel. 

Notes on The Non-Racial by Emma Diatz

   

                                                    

What is the role and fate of racial identities in unshackling us from a racist future? This is a question to which Achille Mbembe, Adam Habib, and Ahmed Kathrada kept returning in their conversation and that is  taken up again and again in all the different sessions.

One vision of such a future travels under the name of non-racialism. Given that a particular version of non-racialism has come to dominate our critical and political imaginary as though it were the only one conceivable, it is worth acknowledging the possibility that there may in fact be varieties of non-racialism that they are not necessarily equal in their moral and political consequences. 

The possibility and potential of varieties of non-racialism – and why not? – was brought into focus for me through the contrast between the non-racialism that David Theo Goldberg deconstructed in his session on Stuart Hall and the non-racialism that Achille Mbembe constructed in his lecture on "raceless futures." 

The rendition of non-racialism that Goldberg gives us is the one with which most of us are familiar. It is the non-racialism that is frequently, though not exclusively, deployed by white folks to discourage conversations implicating whites in the historical responsibility of racism as its architects, beneficiaries, and, I would argue, its first moral casualties. 

It is the non-racialism that, by removing the conceptual language of race, makes it theoretically impossible for blacks to articulate experiences of racism or for anyone, including whites, to object to or resist racism. 

To describe the non-racialism that Achille offers is a much more difficult exercise. Because non-racialism has so often served racist interests it is hard to imagine its other possibilities. The vision of human relations that seems to me to animate this alternative non-racialism is a vision in which our relations are not determined through a racialized reading of one another’s bodies followed by a racialized and racializing projection of expected concerns, tastes, feelings, moral commitments, desires and so on, onto the other. 

But are there ways in which this vision of the non-racial is divorced from the ongoing social reality of race?

Author Bio: 

Emma Diatz a doctoral student at UCT, writing on the Black Consciousness Movement with a biographical focus on Vuyelwa Mashalaba, who worked closely with Biko but about whom little is written. I have the good fortune to be doing this under the guidance of Xolela Mangcu. Her intellectual interests are animated by a concern for justice and fairness and I am particularly inspired at the moment by thinkers like Richard Pithouse, David Scott, Patrick Chabal, and Rick Turner, among others. 

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Image by Naadira Patel.