Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa

by Thomas Blom Hansen

Overview

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after.


Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691152950
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/22/2012
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Thomas Blom Hansen is professor of anthropology and the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of South Asian Studies at Stanford University, where he also directs the Center for South Asia. His books include The Saffron Wave and Wages of Violence (both Princeton).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Under the Gaze: Freedom and Race after Apartheid 3

Freedom and Sovereignty after Apartheid 9

Melancholia of Freedom 15

Between Irrelevance and Irreverence: "Our Culture" after Apartheid 17

Structure of the Book 20

Methods and Material 24

CHAPTER 1 Ethnicity by Fiat: The Remaking of Indian Life in South Africa 26

The Asiatic Question 27

The New Hygienic Indian 32

Census et Censura 35

The New Indian Social Body 38

Policing the Internal Frontier 46

Containing the Bush: Crime and Vigilantes in the Age of Democratic Policing 51

CHAPTER 2 Domesticity and Cultural Intimacy 59

From Kinship to Family 59

The New Indian Woman and the Family House 64

Tongues without Speech: Caste as Language Community 74

"Our Culture" as Embarrassment 77

Cultural Intimacy and Embarrassment: Charous and Lahnees 79

Class and Charou Names 82

Performing in the Gaze: The Indian Public Sphere 84

Joke-Work on a Saturday Morning 87

Comic Belief? Laughter and Cultural Intimacy 91

Charou 4 Eva: Domesticity Lost and Refound 95

CHAPTER 3 Charous and Ravans: A Story of Mutual Nonrecognition 97

AmaKula and amaZulu on the Colonial Estates 99

Durban, January 1949: "The Largest Race Riot in the World" 102

Cato Manor and the Urban Zulu 107

The Indian "1949 Syndrome" as a Social Text 110

The Syndrome Affirmed: Inanda 1985 116

Racism?s Two Bodies 119

Racial Practice, Indian-Style 123

Africans at Our Doorsteps 127

Somatic Anxieties 131

Nonrecognition and the Elusive Master 136

CHAPTER 4 Autonomy, Freedom, and Political Speech 142

Local Affairs and the Problem of Indian Speech 145

The House of Delhigoats 151

"Scandals Are the Foundations of the State" 155

Who Speaks for the Community? The Particular as Universalist Gesture 160

The Only Good Indian Is a Poor Indian: The ANC and the Indian Townships 163

"All the Way": On the Ways of the Tiger 167

From Tragedy to Comedy: Politics as a Form of Enjoyment 171

CHAPTER 5 Movement, Sound, and Body in the Postapartheid City 176

The Steel Cages of Modernity 177

Driving while Brown 179

(Auto)mobility in the Postapartheid City 182

Vehicular Vernacular: Visual and Sonic 185

Taxis, Charou-Style 188

Conclusion: "Indianness," African-Style 197

CHAPTER 6 The Unwieldy Fetish: Desi Fantasies, Roots Tourism, and Diasporic Desires 200

India as an Unwieldy Fetish 201

The Spiritual Homeland 203

Seeking Ancestral Roots 203

Finding Spiritual Truth 207

Catalysts of Modernity 209

Global Desi Dreamscapes: The Revival of Bollywood in South Africa 211

"What Does This Film Make of Me?" 212

Plot Summary 214

Who Are We Indians, After All? 217

Diaspora and the Unwieldy Fetish 220

CHAPTER 7 Global Hindus and Pure Muslims: Universalist Aspirations and Territorialized Lives 223

Hinduism in Translation 226

Religious Practices, Hindu Missionaries, and Cultural Purification 228

A Nervous Relationship: Contemporary Hindu Practices in the Townships 231

The Call of Global Hinduism 236

Globalized Islam and the Impurities of the Past 239

Muslim Durban 240

Deculturation and the Invention of the Pure Muslim 247

"Oh Lord, Won?t You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz?" 252

Da?wah in the Township 256

Reaching for the Universal 259

CHAPTER 8 The Saved and the Backsliders: The Charou Soul and the Instability of Belief 261

The Fragility of the Charou Soul 266

Signs of the Spirit 269

Reconfiguring Patriarchy and Gendered Surveillance 270

On Suits and Sermons 273

Looking like Kentucky . . . 277

Race, Gender, Body 282

Between Vessel and Substance: On the Exteriority of the Soul 286

Postscript: Melancholia in the Time of the "African Personality" 290

Notes 297

References 325

Index 345

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"With profound insight, Hansen explores the struggles of South African Indians to take possession of their new political and cultural liberty since the end of apartheid. Showing how they are haunted by a past they cannot openly mourn and bereft of the ambiguous certainties once ensured by a racist state, this compelling and highly original book calls on us to rethink the complex challenges that attend the meaning of freedom everywhere."—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

"This excellent book provides a subtle and convincingly argued analysis of the 'embarrassment' inherent in belonging to a community which was marginal-within-marginal to the South African mainstream. In exploring complicities and dependencies as well as forms of resistance, and in fusing together issues of politics, popular culture, and religion, it takes a substantial step beyond much of the literature on postapartheid South Africa."—Deborah James, London School of Economics and Political Science

"Melancholia of Freedom is an extraordinarily powerful and eloquent account of postapartheid realities. Given the depth and breadth of this sensitive and insightful book, and the vast array of important issues covered, it will no doubt become a classic ethnographic text on contemporary South Africa."—Steven Robins, University of Stellenbosch

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the 2013 Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association

From the Publisher

"Hansen's analysis of the 'mutual nonrecognition' between citizens of India and African origin and his critical interrogation of the concept of diaspora are especially powerful. . . . The book will be an asset to scholars and students seeking to understand urban South Africa, transnationalism, and religious transformation."

Choice

Hansen's book is definitely a very important one. . . . [S]tudents of segregation, ethnic conflict, urban space, identity, religion, migration, music and cinema will all find something of interest here. More generally, Melancholia of Freedom offers a fascinating insight into the fate of minority groups, and the boundary work they engage in. . . . Hansen's account allows us to better understand the processes through which minorities maintain identity and sociability in difficult contexts.

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