Hook, Derek2017-04-242017-04-242015-10-12Derek Hook (2015) Petrified life, Social Dynamics, 41:3, 438-460, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2015.1092310.0253-3952 (print)1940-7874 (online)10.1080/02533952.2015.1092310http://hdl.handle.net/2263/60019How 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 A third source, an unpublished text contributed to the Apartheid Archive concerning a fantasised scene of violence, enables us to sketch a third form of temporal experience common to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.en© 2015 Taylor & Francis. This is an electronic version of an article published in Social Dynamics, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 438-460, 2015. doi: 10.1080/02533952.2015.1092310. Social Dynamics is available online at : http://www.tandfonline.comtoc/rsdy20.ApartheidGuiltNostalgiaRepetitionRetributionTemporalityWaitingPostprint Article