State of urgency

Abstract

William Faulkner’s appalled recognition – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ – sets the scene for many of the animating concerns of this Special Issue. This is focused on work in and debates around the humanities in South Africa, where many artists and academics appear to be wrestling with a particularly strong version of Faulkner’s dilemma. For just over 20 years after the formal dismantling of apartheid embodied in the adoption of South Africa’s new Constitution, what we are witnessing is a living on of the past, a startled recognition that the past is not even past. For the structural persistence of forms of racialized inequality at every level of society and of the economy is now becoming increasingly expressed and articulated in and through the deeply polarising debates around higher education which are largely taking place within the humanities. This persistence of the past, combined with the dictates of a national higher education policy cloned from a global template indifferent or even hostile to the humanities and the qualitative social sciences, exerts both globally familiar and locally specific pressures on the possibilities and potentials for humanist study and critical reflection. In these pages we cannot pretend to cover or fully represent the totality of work in the arts and humanities in South Africa. However, we hope that this assemblage of snapshots, glimpses and fragments of work will nonetheless work to yield some insight into the South African academy, and offer some sense of its uneasy relation to the larger forces and conflicts of the nation and the state. All of these conflicts are now rapidly coming to a head in the university system, where as we write, campuses across the country are closed due to student protests. #FeesMustFall follows on the #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015. Here, a student in a well-publicized demonstration stirred up students across the country (and beyond) by throwing a bottle of human waste over the statue – centrally placed at UCT – of the great symbol of colonialism, Cecil John Rhodes, resulting in the at least temporary and perhaps