Entanglement

This title is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. Entanglement aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterizes the present. The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name. In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation whit a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury. This title works with the idea of entanglement – a rubric within which we can begin to meet the challenge of the 'after apartheid'. Entanglement offers a means by which to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from a common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience. It points away from a time of resistance towards a more ambivalent moment, in which the time of potential, both latent and actively surfacing in South Africa, exists in complex tandem with new kinds of closure and opposition.

"... a finger-on-the-pulse report from the cultural frontline of contemporary South Africa. Elegantly and lucidly written, it offers a penetrating and unique analysis of the complex and paradoxical forms of culture emerging in South Africa now. -Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg"

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.