Petrified life
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Date
Authors
Hook, Derek
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Routledge
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 A third source, an unpublished text contributed to the Apartheid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.
Description
Keywords
Apartheid, Guilt, Nostalgia, Repetition, Retribution, Temporality, Waiting
Sustainable Development Goals
Citation
Derek Hook (2015) Petrified life, Social Dynamics, 41:3, 438-460, DOI:
10.1080/02533952.2015.1092310.