Full Description
We Are Not South African explores how national identity functions as a colonial tool of communication, control, and power. Author Rachel Lara van der Merwe examines how humans and the planet are integrally shaped by the idea of the nation, and speculates on how different sociopolitical imaginaries, instead of the nation, could inform ways of being-together in the world.
Linking national identity to colonialism, the book broadens the idea of the nation to include its impact on all forms of life, human and more-than-human. Van der Merwe builds her argument on three central observations: that nations are made up of conflicting and fractured imaginaries, not unified, cohesive ones; the nation is divisive by nature, tracing back to its colonial origins; and the nation, along with the state, exploits both humans and more-than-humans. In order to build a more just and sustainable planetary society, she argues, liberation from such colonial formations is vital. In response, the book asks: How could we reimagine how we organize our societies through values of relationality and mutual care rather than rigid borders? What sociopolitical imaginaries do we need, or already possess, that might inform new configurations of community?
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Imagining the Social, Imagining the Nation
Chapter 3: Unsettling, Delinking, and Staying with the Trouble
Chapter 4: Struggling over the Idea of South Africa
Chapter 5: National Identity from Afar
Chapter 6: Emigration as Extraction
Chapter 7: Remediating Water: From a Medium of Life to a National Resource
Chapter 8: Colonial Water in the Cape
Chapter 9: Protocols of Planetary Translation
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
