Abstract:
How might we read temporality, that is, the psychical and social experience of
time, as an index of the prevailing political and intersubjective impasses of the
apartheid and post-apartheid eras? This paper explores three perspectives on this
broad problematic. Achille Mbembe’s thoughts on repetition and nostalgia provide,
firstly, a means of understanding one characteristically post-apartheid mode
of temporality: that of suspended history. Crapanzano’s notion of waiting, elaborated
as a means of grasping the white anxiety of the late apartheid period,
allows us, secondly, to conceptualise the de-realised experience of a muted or
deadened time. A third source, an unpublished text contributed to the Apartheid
Archive concerning a fantasised scene of violence, enables us to sketch a third
form of temporal experience common to apartheid and post-apartheid experiences
alike, namely that of imagined retribution. These ostensibly separate and
distinct modes of temporality can be read as interlocking forms of “petrified
life,” a term I use to link temporalities of immobilisation characterised by
suspension, stasis and fear.
