Empire and Nation

In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitics of apartheid was not merely a reaction to the setting sun of the British Empire, or the dissolution of liberal reason. It was, as I will show, a response to the very question of political subjectivity in liberal discourse. Biopolitics, in contrast to ideological racism, demands a reading of empire that advances and elaborates a concept of the post-apartheid. To this end, earlier critical models that were applied to readings of empire specifically locate empire's force in imperial war or the ravages of imperialism. Perhaps such critiques may be productively enlivened by a demand to keep the desire for the post-apartheid in sight. To the extent that empire always also reveals itself as the story of the postcolonial nation, might the intended critique of the South African empire afford us an opportunity to think our way out of the tragic scripts of the 19th and 20th centuries?