1913: South Africa and the Black Atlantic
ABSTRACT:
The opening line of Sol T. Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa explains that “[a]waking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth” (Plaatje 1). Plaatje referred to the Native Land Act which promulgated the upscaling of state-sanctioned land dispossession of the black majority in South Africa; the act laid the foundations for apartheid, its brand of (racial) capitalism and the creation of black ‘homelands’/separate states. But also signed into law in 1913 was a clause referred to as the “prohibited immigrant” clause of the 1913 Immigrants Regulation Act. The first immigration
legislation of the union of South Africa, the act was aimed at curbing Indian migration to the union, but by the 1920s it was deployed to contain a swart gevaar (black peril), black radicals and Garveyites moving to South Africa, home to one of the largest chapters of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA.
My lecture explores the ways in which 1913 has been memorialized as the key date in the dispossession of black South Africans, while its significance to thwarting the emergence of one global sensibility of blackness in South Africa, and the land question beyond the nation-state,remains relatively submerged.
Presenter Bio:
Dr. Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Johannesburg. Over the last three years she held a joint appointment at PARI (Public Affairs Research Institute) and WiSER, dividing her time between both Institutes. She has taught at the University of Cape Town and was inaugural Director of the South African program of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity, in partnership with Columbia University and Atlantic Philanthropies to bring together scholars, activists and artists whose work shares a commitment to disrupting and dismantling anti-black racism, with fellows coming from the US and South Africa. Victoria co-convenes the National Institute of the Humanities (NIHSS) Catalytic Project (2016-2018) entitled “Other Universals,” which focuses on intellectual connections across India, the Caribbean and Africa and the recently awarded Mellon supranational iteration of “Other Universals.” Her current book project, Before Nation: Black Solidarity Before the Rise of Anti-Colonial Nationalism, excavates black globalism in Cape Town at the dawn of the twentieth century and its investments in empire thinking. She has published in Small Axe and Callaloo along with other publications, and guest edited an issue of The Black Scholar. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
The event is open to the Public. For more information, call: 02003052000