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.

Current Research Project

Instead of treating the city or polis as the traditional unit of politico-philosophical analysis from which the economic function of township can only derive, Dr Naicker’s research reconceptualizes, following the work of Achille Mbembe, the township as the structural form of necropolitics which discloses the universal features of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘camp’, as a political technology. Employing Foucauldian historiography, he argues that an ontological historicization of the township as a spatialized heterotopic political technology can illuminate features of the camp as the nomos of modernity. A necropolitical analysis does not negate the reality of racial capitalism. However, it does problematize the constitution of the black body solely as labour power, tracing how sovereign violence produces modes of un-bonding, social dysfunction and racialised ‘bare life’. Configuring the township as a Manichean ‘deathworld’, enables a deep psychoanalytic and existential reading of the black body as the site of structural violence and racialised trauma. In conclusion, drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Dr Naicker aims to demonstrate that the ‘township camp’ in South Africa is not simply a violent technology of de-subjectification, but a fertile space of resistance, healing and subjectivation, citing the case of Black Consciousness.

Recent Publications

Journal Articles

Luckett, K., & Naicker, V. (2016). Responding to misrecognition from a (post)/colonial university. Critical studies in education, 60(2), 187-204.

Naicker, V. (2019). Ressentiment in the Postcolony: A Nietzschean analysis of self and otherness. Angelaki: Theoretical Journal of the Humanities, 24(2), 61-77.

Naicker, V. (2023). The problem of epistemological critique in contemporary Decolonial theory. Social Dynamics, 49(2), 220-241. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2023.2226497

Book Chapters

Naicker, V., & Luckett, K. (2022). Haunting in a postcolony: Race, place and intergenerational trauma on a South African campus. In Memory and Identity (pp. 133-150). Routledge.

Naicker, V. (2020). Ressentiment in the Postcolony: A Nietzschean analysis of self and otherness. In The African Other (pp. 60-76). Routledge.