UCLA

"Pigments of Our Imagination: Anthropological Myths, Racial Archives and the Transnationalism of Apartheid" repositions South African cultural production within discourses on Africa, the Black Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. By focusing on apartheid's intellectual origins, this project begins by mapping the production of a transnational race discourse between Germany and South Africa in order to situate apartheid within a broader circulation of ideas on race and colonial governmentality. I argue that this transnational dialogue embodies a larger shift in the racial technologies utilized by nation-states over the course of the twentieth century, in which the employment of anthropology gained increasing significance in the development of national race policies. Exploring the ways in which pre-apartheid intellectuals articulated a `new language' for representing race to the state, I demonstrate that as apartheid ideology coalesced it did so under an increasingly cartographical rubric for imagining how races were to be organized within South Africa. As a form of colonial racial governance, I show how apartheid's geographical mapping of race was also ideologically buttressed by a historical imperative of projecting ideas of racial difference and distinction back into the southern African past. I argue that this mythologizing was part of apartheid's attempt to `ground' itself as an organic, and indigenous, ideology of the South Africa nation. In order to interrogate this racist mythology, I trace a history of South African cultural production - from early, pre-apartheid black literature to contemporary performance and visual art - that, in demonstrating a consistent discourse on racial and cultural creolization in South Africa, runs counter to apartheid mythologies of separation. In the final chapter, I move towards an `oceanic' critique of apartheid's rigid, continentally-based system of classification. I argue that the visual economies of the Indian Ocean offer a regional vantage point from which to view South African apartheid as part of a nexus of transoceanic exchange across the southern tip of Africa. I conclude that a history of creolization discourse in South Africa not only undoes the equation of apartheid as an exceptionalist, national anomaly, but also demonstrates South Africa's entanglement in in the global circulation of racial ideas.