In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilized in various ways---through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty, and capital---submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism, and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.

Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley; Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER); and author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India.

List of Illustrations  ix
Abbreviations  xiii
Prelude: What Remains?  xvii
Maps  xxvii
Introduction. Detritus in Durban, 2002–2008  1
Part I: Racial Palimpsest
1. Remains of a Camp: Biopolitical Fantasies of a “White Man’s Country,” 1902–1904  33
2. Settlements of Memory: Forgeries of Life in Common, 1900–1930s  61
3. Ruinous Foundations of Progressive Segregation, 1920s–1930s  97
4. The Birth of Biopolitical Struggle, 1940s  133
5. The Science Fiction of Apartheid’s Spatial Fix, 1948–1970s  157
Part II: Remains of Revolution
6. The Theologico-Political Moment, 1970s  197
7. The Insurrectionist Moment: Armed Struggle, 1960s–1980s  227
8. The Moment of Urban Revolution, 1980s  257
9. The Moment of the Disqualified, 1980s–2000s  303
Conclusion. Accumulating Remains, Rhythms of Expectation  339
Coda. Black Atlantic to Indian Ocean: Afrofuture as the Common  345
Acknowledgments  347
Notes  353
Bibliography  403
Index