Re-reading apartheid: Governmentality, identity, ethics

My project is centred around the study of a particular historical phenomenon, that is, apartheid. The introductory chapter focuses on the period 1948--1990, and represents an attempt at situating apartheid within a wider discourse of Enlightenment and Modernity the later chapters draw upon 18th and 19th century historical, literary and philosophical discourses to examine questions of identity, labour, dissidence and freedom. Drawing upon Foucault's concept of "governmentality," and Deleuze and Guattari's work on nomadology, I attempt to examine the development of the apartheid state and the functioning of apartheid as a strategy of government, regulation and discipline. Subsequently, I examine the constitution of a specific Afrikaner identity and the way in which concepts of identity, race and state were deployed historically to invent a narrative of Afrikaner nationalism inseparable from race-thinking and ultimately, statutory racism. The work then takes up the theme of labour, with a reading of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a prelude to a more specific examination of the idea of work under colonialism and under apartheid. This chapter reflects also on the relationship between labour and the constitution of Afrikaner identity, and on the relation between labour and the apartheid state. The fourth chapter examines an attempted counter-discourse of identity, an oppositional and alternative rendering of "Afrikaner," which seeks to resituate Afrikaans and Afrikaners outside the state-driven discourses of nation and identity. The concluding chapter is framed around a reading of J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, and draws upon Foucault's work on ethics, in order to examine Michael K's story as a platform for Coetzee's interrogation of the relation between apartheid and the broader problematic of power, governmentality, ethics and freedom inherited from the overarching rubric of the discourse of Enlightenment and Modernity.