‘SURVIVING THE FUTURE’

Abstract

Since liberation in 1994, the meaning of ‘South African’ has undergone change. Theoretical terms need to be developed in order to talk about culture and identity in the ‘new’ South Africa. There are rich traditions on which a South African cultural studies could draw, in the context of the Anglo-American domination of the field of cultural studies. However, the complexities of undertaking any kind of cultural studies in the context of the country's history, its inherited and ongoing structures, both material and conceptual, make clear the imperative to localize any theory. A South African cultural studies vocabulary has to forge something that is informed by the past even as it seeks to transcend it. Current attempts to develop a South African cultural vocabulary, such as the African Renaissance and the metaphor of the ‘rainbow nation’, are inadequate, especially in the context of the commodification of the hopes for ‘newness’ of the ‘new’ South Africa. A South African cultural studies vocabulary has to negotiate the difference which is the primary building block of the ‘new’ South Africa and the sameness which is being projected onto the identities under construction as South Africans renegotiate their relationships with Africa, and with each other in the context of ‘nation building’. Creolization and hybridity have both been used to describe aspects of South African identities, in ways which bespeak the importance of countering colonial and apartheid insistences on policing the borders of cultures.

Keywords:

• South African cultural studies
• hybridity
• creolization
• commodification
• nation building

Notes

1. This paper was first presented at the fourth Crossroads Cultural Studies Conference, Urbana-Champaign, June 2004. I am grateful to session participants for a stimulating discussion, particularly to Sean Jacobs for useful feedback on hybridity and creolization. Thanks are also due to Melissa Steyn, whose collaboration with me has informed this work (Distiller and Steyn 2004).

2. For an applied example of how this binary fractures in specifically South African circumstances see Blankenberg (2000).

3. This important book came out just as the present article was going to press. Its arguments are therefore not reflected here.

4. Sean Jacobs objects to the academic nature of much of this theorizing (in his response to the original version of this paper at the Crossroads Conference), as well as to its imported nature. Travelling theory, he says, does not speak to the realities of power in South Africa (Jacobs 2002). As is clear from the contents of this paper, I do not agree, although I do think imported ideas need to be tested against and modified for local conditions.