Melancholia of freedom : social life in an Indian township in South Africa

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Melancholia of freedom : social life in an Indian township in South Africa

Thomas Blom Hansen

Princeton University Press, c2012

  • : pbk

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Includes bibliographical references (p. [325]-343) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

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

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