<div dir="ltr"><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">I write from Cape Town, South Africa (SA), and more specifically, from the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). The SA state acted quickly to ensure a national lockdown under very difficult circumstances of huge inherited inequities, inadequate housing provision, food shortages, and a staggering incidence of HIV infections and Tuberculosis (for this, see Emory University’s Randal Packard’s earlier, but still important history of TB – White Plague, Black Labour). South Africa is no stranger to infectious diseases, and the Cape, in particular, understands the racial aftermaths of the Bubonic Plague of 1901. It resulted in what Maureen Swanson called the sanitation syndrome. This was the basis upon which apartheid biopolitics was founded in the wake of the struggle against fascism in Europe.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Lockdowns seem strangely familiar to those of us who endured detentions without trial, solitary confinements, group areas, and forced removals. But there is something about a global pandemic that stretches our sense of scale. Like most in this group, I am terrified by what lies ahead. It’s brought back painful memories of living through apartheid, without the direct repression of a racialised state. The current pandemic calls for new thinking about apartheid.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">In the weeks leading up to the lockdown, Cesare Casarino (Minnesota) and Ross Truscott (UWC) had been delivering a public lecture series on global apartheid through the CHR. The central premise of the class holds that apartheid was global <i>to</i> begin with. I have often tried to make sense of that claim by pitting it against Tim Campbell and Adam Sitze's conclusion to their essay in the <i>Biopolitics Reader. </i>For Campbell and Sitze, apartheid, for all intents and purposes, is showing up as the condition of biopolitics of the future. While sympathetic to both positions, I am concerned about the absence of a renewed postcolonial push towards an aesthetic theory, in the Adornian sense, to think our way out of biopolitical predicaments that have culminated in our planetary crisis. The pending crisis that we face with the spread of the Coronavirus in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Africa more generally, demands thinking the unprecedented, especially as the Kantian University of the Conflict of the Faculties proves to be hopelessly inadequate for the planetary questions we face.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Much of this sense of danger and promise of thinking ahead has allowed me to return to a book project provisionally titled “The techne of trickery: Race and its Uncanny Returns.” The writing has proceeded in fits and starts, often determined by the ebbs and flows of university politics and a waning sense of confidence. Some of that shifted at the beginning of 2019 while I was on a fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin, Humanities Hub. In Ireland, I discovered a postcolonial poetic sensibility that rekindled the desire for a concept of post-apartheid freedom. Against the backdrop of countless thrilling encounters with public institutions of history and art, I found myself especially inspired by Seamus Heaney’s production of <i>The Cure at Troy</i> and a work of art by Francis Danby, titled <i>The Opening of the Sixth Seal (1828) </i>on display at the Irish National Gallery in Dublin<i>.</i> </span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><a href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-opening-of-the-sixth-seal-39967" target="_blank"><span style="color:blue">https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-opening-of-the-sixth-seal-39967</span></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">The Heaney plays have helped me to identify the cohering impulse in four plays by William Kentridge that ushered in a post-apartheid aesthetic intervention and with which I hope to be in dialogue in the proposed book. More on that later. The Danby painting, completed in 1828, converged with the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the Cape and coincided with a revolution in scientific communication that proved to be indispensable in the genealogy of race upon which apartheid rested. This past week, in the midst of the isolation of the lockdown, I wondered how we would think about Michel Foucault's <i>Order of Things</i> if he had begun his discourse of the birth of human sciences with Danby's <i>The Opening, </i>and not Velasquez's <i>Las Meninas</i>. Would it give us a new perspective on race and how to deal with our concomitant biological fragility? Might it have enabled convergence of aesthetic theory and the genealogy of biopolitics? Or would it give us a new way to think through the convergence of the end of slavery and the revolution in communication technologies in ways that profoundly change how we understand our present?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px">Premesh Lalu (Prof.)<br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px">DST/NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px">Centre for Humanities Research<br>Faculty of Arts<br>University of the Western Cape</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px"><br>Private Bag X 17<br>Bellville<br>7535<br>Cape Town<br>(021) 959 3162<br>0716767806<br><br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:12.8px"><a href="http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/" target="_blank">http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br>
<div><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(69,69,69)">Disclaimer - This e-mail is subject to UWC policies and e-mail disclaimer published on our website at: <span style="color:rgb(228,175,10)"><a href="https://www.uwc.ac.za/Pages/emaildisclaimer.aspx" target="_blank">https://www.uwc.ac.za/<wbr>Pages/emaildisclaimer.aspx</a></span></p></div><div><span style="font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;color:rgb(0,105,217)"><br></span></div>