Stadtgespräch. Metropolitan Perspectives #12

Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 7 pm
Between History and Apocalypse: Stumbling

Premesh Lalu (Director Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town)

In english language

Premesh Lalu discusses the need for an African debate on globalisation, urbanisation, and structures of power. Against this backdrop he referres to issues including apartheid, post-apartheid and the role of technology in his lecture. Apartheid was founded on a division of individual and technology, mind and city, and thought and memory enacted through a reductive politics of racial subjection. In the process it produced a condition of stasis in which history and the future of a post-apartheid were marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse. In seeking to escape this nightmare, one may discover in the dream of the post-apartheid a stasis that does not amount to a dead end. Instead, one could return to a formulation of stasis that for the ancient Greeks approximated something akin to movement at rest. Drawing on the resources of cinema, jazz, music, and memory, apartheid’s exteriorization of technology proved disastrous both for the critique of apartheid and for elaborating a concept of the post-apartheid. From the ruins of the global industrialization of memory, Premesh Lalu asks for a different approach to technology if only to provide with a way of stumbling upon the post-apartheid.

Premesh Lalu, professor of history and director of the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Capetown (South Africa). Inspired by the student struggles of 1985 in Athlone, a district in Cape Town, where he served as a founding member of the Athlone Student Action Committee. He pursued his studies at the University of the Western Cape, University of Natal-Durban (currently University of Kwa-Zulu Natal), and the University of Minnesota. He is author of The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) and the co-editor of Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacy (2012).