Ties That Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa

✍ Scribed by Shannon Walsh; Jon Soske

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 346
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of Figures
Fanon’s Secret
1. Thinking about Race and Friendship in South Africa
2. With Friends like These: The Politics of Friendship in Post -Apartheid South Africa
3. Bound to Violence: Scratching Beginnings and Endings with Lesego Rampolokeng
4. Afro-Pessimism and Friendship in South Africa: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson III
5. The Impossible Handshake: The Fault Lines of Friendship in Colonial Natal, 1850–1910
6. The Problem with ‘We’: Affiliation, Political Economy, and the Counterhist ory of Nonracialism
7. Affect and the State : Precarious Workers, the Law, and the Promise of Friendship
8. ‘A Song of Seeing’: Art and Friendship under Apartheid
9. ‘Friend of the Family’: Maids, Madams, and Domestic Cartographies of Power in South African Art
10. Corner Loving: Ways of Speaking about Love
11. Kutamba Naye: In Search of Anti-Racist and Queer Solidarities
12. The Native Informant Speaks Bac k to the Offer of Friendship in White Academia
Acknowledgments
Contributor Biographies
Index