Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa

Description

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after. Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction Under the Gaze: Freedom and Race after Apartheid Freedom and Sovereignty after Apartheid Melancholia of Freedom Between Irrelevance and Irreverence: “Our Culture” after Apartheid Structure of the Book Methods and Material Chapter 1: Ethnicity by Fiat: The Remaking of Indian Life in South Africa The Asiatic Question The New Hygienic Indian Census et Censura The New Indian Social Body Policing the Internal Frontier Containing the Bush: Crime and Vigilantes in the Age of Democratic Policing Chapter 2: Domesticity and Cultural Intimacy From Kinship to Family The New Indian Woman and the Family House Tongues without Speech: Caste as Language Community “Our Culture” as Embarrassment Cultural Intimacy and Embarrassment: Charous and Lahnees Class and Charou Names Performing in the Gaze: The Indian Public Sphere Joke-Work on a Saturday Morning Comic Belief? Laughter and Cultural Intimacy Charou 4 Eva: Domesticity Lost and Refound Chapter 3: Charous and Ravans: A Story of Mutual Nonrecognition AmaKula and amaZulu on the Colonial Estates Durban, January 1949: “The Largest Race Riot in the World” Cato Manor and the Urban Zulu The Indian “1949 Syndrome” as a Social Text The Syndrome Affirmed: Inanda 1985 Racism’s Two Bodies Racial Practice, Indian-Style Africans at Our Doorsteps Somatic Anxieties Nonrecognition and the Elusive Master Chapter 4: Autonomy, Freedom, and Political Speech Local Affairs and the Problem of Indian Speech The House of Delhigoats “Scandals Are the Foundations of the State” Who Speaks for the Community? The Particular as Universalist Gesture The Only Good Indian Is a Poor Indian: The ANC and the Indian Townships “All the Way”: On the Ways of the Tiger From Tragedy to Comedy: Politics as a Form of Enjoyment Chapter 5: Movement, Sound, and Body in the Postapartheid City The Steel Cages of Modernity Driving while Brown (Auto)mobility in the Postapartheid City Vehicular Vernacular: Visual and Sonic Taxis, Charou-Style Conclusion: “Indianness,” African-Style Chapter 6: The Unwieldy Fetish: Desi Fantasies, Roots Tourism, and Diasporic Desires India as an Unwieldy Fetish The Spiritual Homeland Seeking Ancestral Roots Finding Spiritual Truth Catalysts of Modernity Global Desi Dreamscapes: The Revival of Bollywood in South Africa “What Does This Film Make of Me?” Plot Summary Who Are We Indians, After All? Diaspora and the Unwieldy Fetish Chapter 7: Global Hindus and Pure Muslims: Universalist Aspirations and Territorialized Lives Hinduism in Translation Religious Practices, Hindu Missionaries, and Cultural Purification A Nervous Relationship: Contemporary Hindu Practices in the Townships The Call of Global Hinduism Globalized Islam and the Impurities of the Past Muslim Durban Deculturation and the Invention of the Pure Muslim “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz?” Da’wah in the Township Reaching for the Universal Chapter 8 The Saved and the Backsliders: The Charou Soul and the Instability of Belief The Fragility of the Charou Soul Signs of the Spirit Reconfiguring Patriarchy and Gendered Surveillance On Suits and Sermons Looking like Kentucky . . . Race, Gender, Body Between Vessel and Substance: On the Exteriority of the Soul Postscript: Melancholia in the Time of the “African Personality” Notes References Index