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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | The Border and the Body: Post Phenomenological Reflections on the Borders of Apartheid |
| Author: | Lalu, Premesh |
| Year: | 2006 |
| Periodical: | South African Historical Journal |
| Issue: | 55 |
| Pages: | 106-124 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa Transkei |
| Subjects: | colonial conquest historiography indirect rule boundaries 1850-1899 colonialism History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
| External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02582470609464933 |
| Abstract: | The author argues that reading the colonial archive as a mode of evidence might yield a story other than that anticipated by the violence of the modernist event of apartheid. He draws out the connection between colonialism and apartheid by reflecting on the discourse of borders and boundaries as consequences of the excess of language. The colonial archive should not be seen merely as composed of techniques of governmentality but as a narrative strategy in its own right. Borders form when 'what can be said is folded into what is actually said' in the 'prose of counterinsurgency'. This phrase is proposed by Ranajit Guha for the unreadable traces of subalternity in official archives and its derivative historiographies. The author illustrates his argument with developments in the Transkei culminating in the year 1885, when the annexation of Gcalekaland to the Cape Colony took place. He argues that the finalization of the border can be traced in the cracks that appeared in the system of indirect rule involving the Xhosa king Sarhili. The effect of the prose of counterinsurgency was that it produced a state of insecurity. The boundary was more than a means of creating administrative units. It also served to demarcate the realms of the secure and the insecure. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
