[-empyre-] [-Empyre-] What does it mean to think ahead of the Covid Curve?

[Premesh Lalu]

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.



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.



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 *to* 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 *Biopolitics Reader. *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.



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 *The
Cure at Troy* and a work of art by Francis Danby, titled *The Opening of
the Sixth Seal (1828) *on display at the Irish National Gallery in Dublin*.*
  https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-opening-of-the-sixth-seal-39967



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 *Order of Things* if he had begun his discourse of the
birth of human sciences with Danby's *The Opening, *and not Velasquez's *Las
Meninas*. 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?






Premesh Lalu (Prof.)
DST/NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities
Centre for Humanities Research
Faculty of Arts
University of the Western Cape

Private Bag X 17
Bellville
7535
Cape Town
(021) 959 3162
0716767806

http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/

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