The discursive construction of the ‘settler’ and the ‘native’ in South Africa is at the heart of a politics of (un)belonging that was forged in the colonial period, elaborated under apartheid, and that still holds power in the present. Word-histories of terms such as ‘native’ evince regimes of value that produce differential rights to space, sociality, and feeling at home. Successive ideologies of subjection and subjectivation have thus mobilized narratives of autochthonous group origins and their subsequent movements to bolster or discount notions of purity, inheritance and entitlement. These narratives are often given the imprimatur of factuality by scholars claiming expertise on history, genetics, culture, or evidence of settlement. But how we come to know about indigeneity is an unavoidably political question. Indigenous activism and scholarship around the world has drawn attention to the fundamental opposition of the land ontologies of colonised people to the commodification of the earth under capitalism. Critical Indigeneity scholars write of the “white possessive” as a mode of subjectivity that emerges from the specific historical conjuncture where Europeans armed with liberal philosophies of property and progress set about occupying and exploiting all corners of the globe. This project was also about appropriating knowledge through documenting and categorizing people, establishing systems of education and training, and of strengthening the imperial metropole’s claim to know what was happening in the periphery. To “decolonise” in this context is to thus not only to undo white possession and decommodify the earth, but also to reorient the way we think about race, indigeneity and property.
Scholarship on the co-production of race, indigeneity and property has to date been dominated by discussions of North American and Australasian contexts. Might this picture change if we try to “think indigeneity” from Africa? In line with this year’s conference theme of crossing boundaries and recovering African intellectual traditions, this panel seeks to read narrative claims to indigeneity in South Africa through a critical lens that questions how critical Indigenous studies travels. Experiences of colonisation, forced migration, chattel slavery, indentured labour, Bantustan policies, and post-apartheid neoliberalism, have all yielded knowledge about what being ‘truly’ indigenous to the land does or ought to mean in the South African context. This remains a specific type of claim riven with unequal power relations and bearing significant economic and political consequences. Panellists will thus examine how rights, race, and belonging are renovated or undermined through claims of indigeneity and compare instances of telling the stories of indigenous selves or others as moments of possession, resistance, or decolonisation. Submissions across disciplines and types of text are welcomed.
Please send your 200-word abstracts to Scott Burnett, scott.burnett@psu.edu, by midday on Sunday 16 March.
Race, property and “thinking indigeneity” from South Africa
