Charles Villet’s research while affiliated with IIE MSA and other places

This essay claims that heterotopia is characteristic of post-Apartheid South Africa, i.e. where heterotopia is usually the exception in society, it is the norm in South Africa. This claim reinterprets and expands Foucault’s concept: heterotopia here refers to the racialization of place and space, and hence to otherness and difference as primary. The ubiquity of heterotopia post-Apartheid is evident in the life-worlds of white suburbia and the black township. A case study is undertaken of white suburbia through a series of phenomenological descriptions of contemporary South Africa using heterotopia as a heuristic tool. This study demonstrates how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is relevant but also too narrow when related to the postcolonial context. An expanded notion of the term as denoting a racialized experience of space and place is necessary for the purposes of coming to terms with the strangeness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where contradiction and otherness are the norm rather than the exception.

Die naam Eugene de Kock lei tot sterk emosies in gesprekke met Suid-Afrikaners: Vir vele was hy die vergestalting van die boosheid van apartheid en iemand wat nooit weer vryheid buite die tronk mag smaak nie. Vir ander, was sy tronkstraf die onregverdige gevolg van die nodigheid om 'n sondebok te vind vir die vergrype van die apartheidsregering (226). Die debat oor De Kock se skuld al dan nie fokus op die feit dat hy as 'n gewone misdadiger vervolg is, al was die meeste van sy dade polities gemotiveerd binne 'n sisteem waarin bevrydingsbewegings gekriminaliseer is (234). Hoe dit ook al sy, hy is 'n figuur wat niemand koud laat nie en Anemari Jansen se aangrypende biografie is goed bewus hiervan.

This article builds on Samantha Vice’s argument on the problem of whiteness in contemporary South Africa. I will explore the thesis of invisibility regarding whiteness and argue for its relevance to the rich per se. This thesis demonstrates how white privilege and affluence, despite being glaringly visible in a concrete sense, is rendered invisible together with the mostly black poverty by which it is contrasted. The invisibility of whiteness translates and flows into the so-called ‘invisibility of richness’, which involves anyone who is economically affluent in this country and has the same effect of rendering poverty invisible. The massive and ever-growing divide between rich and poor means that both have fundamentally incommensurate experiences of life in this country, which is why post-apartheid South Africa is such a strange place to live in for all of its inhabitants. In the latter part of the article, a suggestion will be made about what the appropriate response to the injustices of this strange place might look like for whites.