Melancholia of freedom : social life in an Indian township in South Africa / Thomas Blom Hansen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

East Indians--South Africa--Durban.

East Indians.

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa)--Race relations.

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa).

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa)--Social conditions.

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa)--Religion.

Durban (South Africa)--Race relations.

Durban (South Africa).

Durban (South Africa)--Social conditions.

Durban (South Africa)--Religion.

South Africa--Durban.

Physical Description:

xv, 354 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2012.

Summary:

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after.

Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Under the gaze: freedom and race after apartheid

Ethnicity by fiat: the remaking of Indian life in South Africa

Domesticity and cultural intimacy

Charous and Ravans: a story of mutual nonrecognition

Autonomy, freedom, and political speech

Movement, sound, and body in the postapartheid city

The unwieldy fetish: Desi fantasies, roots tourism, and diasporic desires

Global Hindus and pure Muslims: universalist aspirations and territorialized lives

The saved and the backsliders: the Charou soul and the instability of belief

Postscript: Melancholia in the time of the "African personality".

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691152950

0691152950

9780691152967

0691152969

OCLC:

756377642