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:	9781400842612
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/22/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	3 MB

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.

booksandideas.net - Juliette Galonnier