Assembling Oscar, assembling South Africa, assembling affects

Abstract

The cover feature of Time, “Oscar Pistorius and South Africa's Culture of Violence” (Perry 2013), assembles the shooting body of Oscar Pistorius and the dead body of Reeva Steenkamp in and as the body of post-apartheid South Africa. In analyzing this cover feature, mobilizing Deleuzian concepts, we consider how the bodily presence or absence of Oscars' prostheses at the time of the shooting – critical to the juridical establishment of his vulnerability and fear, and hence his innocence or guilt – is figured in relation to the history of race relations through which the author, Alex Perry, builds the moral compass that points toward South Africa's future. We also speculate about the relations through which the extra-textual material body of the reader is co-implicated in the event that is being assembled in this text. This is not to give a stable or final account of the text, the shooting, or the reader, but rather to contemplate the ways in which textual assemblages might become assembled for, by, in and as the collective body of a nation state or a reader.