{"product_id":"undoing-apartheid-9781509552832","title":"Undoing Apartheid","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ePost-apartheid South Africa still struggles to overcome the past, not just because the material conditions of apartheid linger but because the intellectual conditions it created have not been thoroughly dismantled. The system of 'petty apartheid', which controlled the minutia of everyday life, became a means of dragooning human beings into adapting to increasingly mechanized forms of life that stifle desire and creative endeavour. As a result, apartheid is incessantly repeated in the struggle to move beyond it.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eUndoing Apartheid\u003c\/i\u003e, Premesh Lalu argues that only an aesthetic education can lead to a future beyond apartheid. To find ways to escape the vicious cycle, he traces the patterns created by three theatrical works by William Kentridge, Jane Taylor, and the Handspring Puppet Company – \u003ci\u003eFaustus in Africa\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWoyzeck on the Highveld\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eUbu and the Truth Commission\u003c\/i\u003e – which coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. Through the analysis of these works, Lalu uncovers the roots of modern thinking about race and affirms the need to revitalize a post-apartheid reconciliation endowed with truth – if only to keep alive the rhyme of hope and history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e“Undoing Apartheid \u003c\/i\u003eoffers an unexpected, unorthodox, and deeply rewarding read.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eSouth African Journal of Science\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The book raises many questions about post-apartheid and postcoloniality, as well as showing in an original way how to address these issues with a different approach and method in addition to existing approaches in the literature.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAfrican Studies Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \"In this stunningly original work of intellectual and aesthetic history, Premesh Lalu offers a powerful theory of petty apartheid as a process of deindividuation and objectification through the manipulation of the senses. By excavating the psychotechnics of a century-long biological racism and its revelation in contemporary object-theatre, Lalu’s book illuminates a path towards an aesthetic education from which a post-apartheid world can emerge. An extraordinary achievement by South Africa’s leading historian and humanist.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDebjani Ganguly,\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eUniversity of Virginia\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“I read \u003ci\u003eUndoing Apartheid\u003c\/i\u003e over the weekend – what a fantastic discussion. I’ve been inspired by it – not only how it reads Seamus Heaney’s \u003ci\u003eThe Cure at Troy\u003c\/i\u003e but the insights into so many other works (the Danby painting included). Building it around the trio of performances works brilliantly: I could understand not only the petty apartheid thesis but also the crucial segue of grand apartheid into techno-capitalism. And I am already borrowing from the discussion of slapstick from the \u003ci\u003eUbu and the Truth Commission\u003c\/i\u003e section. It reflects pertinently on the genres which have responded to the parallel situation in Northern Ireland. Abdullah Ibrahim too…superb.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eProfessor Eve Patten, Director of the \u003ci\u003eTrinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute\u003c\/i\u003e, Trinity College\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“[A]n important book, beautifully written, challenging and rewarding.”\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJohn K. Noyes in \u003ci\u003eFreund Humanus\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Brilliant and necessary. In this luminous book, Premesh Lalu uncovers the brutal legacies of apartheid’s assault on sensual and perceptual life. Only an aesthetic education, he argues, can open up the true hope of post-apartheid future. Written with astute theoretical attentiveness, and with poetry at its heart, \u003ci\u003eUndoing Apartheid \u003c\/i\u003eis an inspiring blueprint for the aesthetic education it urges. In an era when attacks on the arts and humanities across the world are blatant, Lalu suggests where criticism and creativity might begin again: in Athlone, Cape Town, and in all the other communities across the world where partition and violence have wreaked their worst.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLyndsey Stonebridge, author of \u003ci\u003ePlaceless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“a wonderfully provocative and fascinating read”\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGarth Stevens, \u003ci\u003eAfrika focus\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e“Occasionally, an intellectual product sees the light of day which forces the reader to rethink many of their cherished assumptions, thereby providing a new perspective on an old problem. Premesh Lalu’s Undoing Apartheid is such a book.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eJournal of Asian and African Studies\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What politics of knowledge, form of study, mode of education, will get us to the substantive work of undoing apartheid in the present? This is Premesh Lalu’s abiding and forceful question. To get there, we must go back, and deeper, into histories less of grand than of petty apartheid, newly alert now to how the latter both wedged itself in the circuits of sense and perception, he avers. These circuits left little room for escape or desire \u003ci\u003eand\u003c\/i\u003e found substantive contestation, one we would do well to harness today, Lalu suggests, in a cinematic consciousness, forged from the bioscopes of Athlone in 1985, growing behind the catch-all sociologies of ‘school boycott’ and ‘mass movement’. It was there, via the interval or gap of film form, that thought emerged and forged a mode of freedom to come. This was a sensibility of the after apartheid that, Lalu contends counter-intuitively, was closer to hand than what followed in its aftermath. In this desire was a redistribution of the senses that pointed, and points still, to an education, a form of study, that is able to charge and create the conditions for a freedom which cannot be known in advance. Lalu finds in object theatre a radical play of modes of racialization and freedom that give form to other futures surpassing the circularities of apartheid logics. Although questions of the post-apartheid and of non-racial futures have come under duress in recent critiques, Lalu offers a recalibration of how we might approach aftermath and regeneration and what we might need in order to hear and see their minor keys, potentialities, and entanglement with future time.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eProfessor Sarah Nuttall, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research [WISER], University of Witwatersrand\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgements\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 1: Introduction: The Double-binds of Apartheid\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 2: Apartheid’s Mythic Precursors\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 3: The Return of Faust: Hyenas, Rats and other Miscreants \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 4: Woyzeck and the Secret Life of Apartheid’s Things\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 5: Post-apartheid Slapstick \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 6: The Double Futures of Post-apartheid Freedom\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography","brand":"John Wiley and Sons Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48867393929559,"sku":"9781509552832","price":17.09,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781509552832.jpg?v=1722283091","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/undoing-apartheid-9781509552832","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}