Suren Pillay
Biographic Data
| ID | 217788 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Suren Pillay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Suren |
| FAMILY NAME | Pillay |
| SIGNATURE | PILLAY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Problem of Colonialism
This article explores the ways in which Latin American decolonial theory is drawn on to make sense of colonial legacies in contemporary Africa. For Latin American decolonial theory, colonialism is characterized by enforced assimilation enacted through epistemic violence. Latin American decolonial theory self-consciously rejects thinking about colonialism as historically specific in favor of the more abstract concept of coloniality. When Latin Ame…
Thinking the State from Africa: Political Theory, Eurocentrism and Concrete Politics
This paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project that we have underway at University of Western Cape, to rethink Political Theory and Philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last two years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and 'decolonizing knowledge'. The second part of this paper will offer a description of a course that I have bee…
The Humanities to Come
This article offers a few vignettes on the humanities in contemporary Africa. It suggests that the different fates of the humanities and social sciences have corresponded to changes in political conjunctures, particularly in relation to nationalism in the wake of independence and conceptions of development and neoliberalism after the Cold War. It further takes up the debates in South Africa, the last African country to confront the dilemmas of de…
Transmission, obligation and movement: An interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne
As debates about the decolonisation of knowledge define the present history of the South African academy, it has become apparent that the terms of the debate seem both new and familiar. New in the
Colonialism and the politicisation of difference
Notes1 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacies of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).2 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Becomes Killers: Native, Colonialism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010).3 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics …
The Prerogative of Civilized Peoples
In 1965 apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. Taking apartheid as a moment in the career of colonial law in South Africa, Pillay’s essay considers the political effects of a debate among a section of South Africa’s liberal critics. It hinged on whether or not to work within the categories of apartheid law, and what the strategic yield of that choice might be politically. In reconsidering this debate, this article explores the relations…
Anxious urbanity: Xenophobia, the Native Subject and the Refugee Camp
Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the ur…
Debates: Marikana and the politics of Law and Order after Apartheid
The Political Imagination of State Reform: Reflections on the Making of Political Community after Apartheid in South Africa
Fortress Sa’? A Response to John Sharp (At 24[4])
Crime, Community and the Governance of Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa
The South African government has embarked on a programme ofencouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemmingfrom high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, tofoster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised andstratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergentforms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities ev…
Confondre phénoménologie, épistémologie et place de la race: Suren Pillay
Locations of violence: Political rationality and death squads in apartheid South Africa
You cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements. In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and
Read the world as closely as you would a book
The practice of reading, and of reading the canonical authors of the West in particular, lost its innocence after Said's Orientalism (1978). Teasing out assumptions, silences, biases, absences and stereotypes are now integral to the technical work of appraising prose and poetic form and syntactic structure
Anti‐colonialism, post‐colonialism and the ‘new man
The question of writing a different history of 'Man', the creation of the New Man, is a project that is found in the writings of such intellectuals as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. In this article an attempt is made to develop some thoughts on the ways in which anti‐colonialism, and later post‐colonialism, seeks to think about the creation of, and problematise, the New Man, and the place of collective subjectivity in this project…
Where do you belong? Natives, foreigners and apartheid South Africa
The paper explores the discursive shifts of the meaning of ‘belonging’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Through a discussion of the disciplinary conceptions of belonging within historiographical and anthropological studies, it argues that these shifts are implicated in complex ways with what should be seen as differentiated settler–colonial and settler–nationalist projects. Keywords: apartheidsettler–nationalismcolonialismbelonginganthropo…
Problematising the making of good and evil: Gangs and Pagad
In late 1995 a movement emerged from the Cape Flats called the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD). It emerged from neighbourhood watch groups and although it claimed a diverse support base, it had an overwhelmingly Muslim face. Its stated aims were to remove gangsters and end the sale of drugs in communities on the Cape Flats. The dramatic killing of one of Cape Town's most notorious gang leaders by a group of PAGAD supporters immediate…
Crime, Community and the Governance of Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa
The South African government has embarked on a programme ofencouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemmingfrom high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, tofoster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised andstratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergentforms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities ev…
Problematising the making of good and evil: Gangs and Pagad
In late 1995 a movement emerged from the Cape Flats called the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD). It emerged from neighbourhood watch groups and although it claimed a diverse support base, it had an overwhelmingly Muslim face. Its stated aims were to remove gangsters and end the sale of drugs in communities on the Cape Flats. The dramatic killing of one of Cape Town's most notorious gang leaders by a group of PAGAD supporters immediate…
Thinking the State from Africa: Political Theory, Eurocentrism and Concrete Politics
This paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project that we have underway at University of Western Cape, to rethink Political Theory and Philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last two years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and 'decolonizing knowledge'. The second part of this paper will offer a description of a course that I have bee…
Anxious urbanity: Xenophobia, the Native Subject and the Refugee Camp
Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the ur…
Fortress Sa’? A Response to John Sharp (At 24[4])
Where do you belong? Natives, foreigners and apartheid South Africa
The paper explores the discursive shifts of the meaning of ‘belonging’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Through a discussion of the disciplinary conceptions of belonging within historiographical and anthropological studies, it argues that these shifts are implicated in complex ways with what should be seen as differentiated settler–colonial and settler–nationalist projects. Keywords: apartheidsettler–nationalismcolonialismbelonginganthropo…
The Humanities to Come
This article offers a few vignettes on the humanities in contemporary Africa. It suggests that the different fates of the humanities and social sciences have corresponded to changes in political conjunctures, particularly in relation to nationalism in the wake of independence and conceptions of development and neoliberalism after the Cold War. It further takes up the debates in South Africa, the last African country to confront the dilemmas of de…
The Prerogative of Civilized Peoples
In 1965 apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. Taking apartheid as a moment in the career of colonial law in South Africa, Pillay’s essay considers the political effects of a debate among a section of South Africa’s liberal critics. It hinged on whether or not to work within the categories of apartheid law, and what the strategic yield of that choice might be politically. In reconsidering this debate, this article explores the relations…
Anti‐colonialism, post‐colonialism and the ‘new man
The question of writing a different history of 'Man', the creation of the New Man, is a project that is found in the writings of such intellectuals as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. In this article an attempt is made to develop some thoughts on the ways in which anti‐colonialism, and later post‐colonialism, seeks to think about the creation of, and problematise, the New Man, and the place of collective subjectivity in this project…
Problematising the making of good and evil: Gangs and Pagad
In late 1995 a movement emerged from the Cape Flats called the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD). It emerged from neighbourhood watch groups and although it claimed a diverse support base, it had an overwhelmingly Muslim face. Its stated aims were to remove gangsters and end the sale of drugs in communities on the Cape Flats. The dramatic killing of one of Cape Town's most notorious gang leaders by a group of PAGAD supporters immediate…
Read the world as closely as you would a book
The practice of reading, and of reading the canonical authors of the West in particular, lost its innocence after Said's Orientalism (1978). Teasing out assumptions, silences, biases, absences and stereotypes are now integral to the technical work of appraising prose and poetic form and syntactic structure
Anti‐colonialism, post‐colonialism and the ‘new man
The question of writing a different history of 'Man', the creation of the New Man, is a project that is found in the writings of such intellectuals as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. In this article an attempt is made to develop some thoughts on the ways in which anti‐colonialism, and later post‐colonialism, seeks to think about the creation of, and problematise, the New Man, and the place of collective subjectivity in this project…
Where do you belong? Natives, foreigners and apartheid South Africa
The paper explores the discursive shifts of the meaning of ‘belonging’ in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Through a discussion of the disciplinary conceptions of belonging within historiographical and anthropological studies, it argues that these shifts are implicated in complex ways with what should be seen as differentiated settler–colonial and settler–nationalist projects. Keywords: apartheidsettler–nationalismcolonialismbelonginganthropo…
Locations of violence: Political rationality and death squads in apartheid South Africa
You cannot find out what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements. In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and
Confondre phénoménologie, épistémologie et place de la race: Suren Pillay
Fortress Sa’? A Response to John Sharp (At 24[4])
Crime, Community and the Governance of Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa
The South African government has embarked on a programme ofencouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemmingfrom high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, tofoster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised andstratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergentforms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities ev…
The Political Imagination of State Reform: Reflections on the Making of Political Community after Apartheid in South Africa
Debates: Marikana and the politics of Law and Order after Apartheid
Anxious urbanity: Xenophobia, the Native Subject and the Refugee Camp
Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the ur…
The Prerogative of Civilized Peoples
In 1965 apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. Taking apartheid as a moment in the career of colonial law in South Africa, Pillay’s essay considers the political effects of a debate among a section of South Africa’s liberal critics. It hinged on whether or not to work within the categories of apartheid law, and what the strategic yield of that choice might be politically. In reconsidering this debate, this article explores the relations…
Colonialism and the politicisation of difference
Notes1 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacies of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).2 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Becomes Killers: Native, Colonialism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010).3 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics …
Transmission, obligation and movement: An interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne
As debates about the decolonisation of knowledge define the present history of the South African academy, it has become apparent that the terms of the debate seem both new and familiar. New in the
The Humanities to Come
This article offers a few vignettes on the humanities in contemporary Africa. It suggests that the different fates of the humanities and social sciences have corresponded to changes in political conjunctures, particularly in relation to nationalism in the wake of independence and conceptions of development and neoliberalism after the Cold War. It further takes up the debates in South Africa, the last African country to confront the dilemmas of de…
Thinking the State from Africa: Political Theory, Eurocentrism and Concrete Politics
This paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project that we have underway at University of Western Cape, to rethink Political Theory and Philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last two years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and 'decolonizing knowledge'. The second part of this paper will offer a description of a course that I have bee…
The Problem of Colonialism
This article explores the ways in which Latin American decolonial theory is drawn on to make sense of colonial legacies in contemporary Africa. For Latin American decolonial theory, colonialism is characterized by enforced assimilation enacted through epistemic violence. Latin American decolonial theory self-consciously rejects thinking about colonialism as historically specific in favor of the more abstract concept of coloniality. When Latin Ame…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (8 works) · South African History and Culture (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · History (5 works)