The Necropolitical Violence of the Township: Interrogating Colonial and Apartheid Trauma

Camp studies and Township studies have traditionally been two distinct fields of research. The aim of this lecture is not to combine the two reductively: demonstrating that the township corresponds perfectly to the death camp. Rather, Dr Naicker suggests that when the township is read as a part of a Necropolitical colonial apparatus, camp studies can yield precious new insights into an old problem: the psychological effects of colonial violence that pertain to a traumatic loss and recovery of self. Using Fanonian analyses of the racial gaze as his point of departure, Dr Naicker suggests that a historicization of the emergence of the South African township can also disclose something novel about the way the black, particularly male body has been constituted in colonial discourse.

Veeran Naicker recently obtained his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Cape Town, for a thesis titled, “The Necropolitical Crisis of Racial Subjectivity in the South African Postcolony: Black Technology as a Consciousness of the Self and the Limits of Transformation.” Dr Naicker’s current research into the Necropolitical structure of the Township, racialised trauma and the black body is supported by a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, at Stellenbosch University. His research interests include postcolonial studies, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory and the intersections between histories of the Anthropocene, racism, patriarchy and capitalism.

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