2025 Theses Doctoral

African Renaissance as Primal Scene: Fantasies of Death and Rebirth After Apartheid

Faux, Chloé

This is a dissertation about the ways in which black reproductivity has been constituted as a problem and a problematic that constitutes the political as such. It has as its scene, its site, and its locus of appearance the world of South Africa in the time of its so-called transition to democracy, which the African National Congress inscribed under the title of ‘African Renaissance.’ or rebirth, might seem to be a term implicating the emergence of a new secular modernity, modeled on the European.

My task in this dissertation is to show how the encrypting of black reproductivity in the mirror image of universal humanism is a ruse. It is also a product and a symptom of a long and multifaceted tradition of building various forms of universality on the problematized status and indeed the endlessly voided but always assumed function of black femininity and black maternity. Reading that history in the present, discerning its traces in efforts to escape that self-same history in South Africa is my task. In doing so, I shall navigate the contradictions of decolonial and feminist discourse and its bad object—anthropology—the academic scenes in which the precolonial is posited and remobilized, the theories of race and sexual difference under apartheid and in the world at large.