Zimitri Erasmus | University of the Witwatersrand (original) (raw)

Papers by Zimitri Erasmus

Anthropology Southern Africa, 2021

This report will be of value to those studying and researching transformation in higher education... more This report will be of value to those studying and researching transformation in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Over the past few years the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT embarked upon a series of transformation processes. Despite these efforts, students at Medical School continue to lodge complaints about racist practices on the part of staff at the School and to claim such practices undermine their learning and academic performance. Following some complaints lodged early in 2001, the Dean of the Faculty convened a meeting where a study was commissioned to provide a scan of issues to inform terms of reference for a panel to be tasked with an in-depth evaluation of processes of transformation at Medical School. These issues are specifically related to students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism

The Effects of Race, 2018

The issue of race as the issue of the Colonial Question, the Non-white-Native Question, the Negro... more The issue of race as the issue of the Colonial Question, the Non-white-Native Question, the Negro Question ... was and is fundamentally the issue of the genre of human, Man.-Sylvia Wynter (2003: 288) And lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and, I would go as far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.-Edward Said (2003: xii-xiii)

Theory, Culture & Society, 2020

How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and teleological acc... more How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and teleological accounts of the human? To grapple with this question I clarify five key concepts in her theory: the Third Emergence, auto- and socio-poiesis, the autopoietic overturn, the human as hybrid, and sociogenesis. I draw on parts of Wynter’s oeuvre, texts she works with and my conversations with Anthony Bogues. Wynter invents a Third Emergence of the world to mark the advent of the human as a hybrid being. She challenges Western conceptions that reduce the human to biological properties. In opposition to Western teleology, her counter-cartography of a history of human life offers a relational conception of human existence which pivots around Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogeny. She draws on Aimé Césaire’s call for a conception of the human made to the measure of the world, not to the measure of ‘Man’. This makes Wynter’s theory counter-, not post-humanist.

Persistence of Race, 2020

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 2019

Listening has long been understood as characteristic of writing centre practice, and as central t... more Listening has long been understood as characteristic of writing centre practice, and as central to writing centre philosophy. This reflective progress report argues that such listening is also the 1 Corresponding author. Nichols et al. http://spilplus.journals.ac.za 132 generating culture of a university-wide writing programme of writing intensive courses, and that this culture will only be manifested and sustained if constantly modelled at all levels of the programme. In order to model what we teach, we need to build listening into the processes and structure of the programme as well as into the classrooms. Through letters from the invited coauthors of this paper, a snapshot is provided of the generative power of active listening in the teaching conversations between professor and writing fellows; lecturer, writing fellow and students; and writing fellows as a team as they create their lesson plan. Active listening is understood as a discipline of attentiveness to multiple and simultaneous meanings, and thus as a discipline which is necessary for complex thought and writing. Edward Said (2013) has described this attentiveness to simultaneity as key to a humanist critical literacy, which not only promotes engaged students and teachers but is also a political commitment to developing the citizen scholar. In the Wits Writing Programme, attentiveness to simultaneity represents a principle of teaching and of learning, an aim of writing, and a guiding value of the programme's construction.

Identities, 2019

In this response to Avtar Brah's review of Race Otherwise (2017) I briefly clarify the relationsh... more In this response to Avtar Brah's review of Race Otherwise (2017) I briefly clarify the relationship between the concepts 'racism', 'race' and 'racialisation'. I expand my framing of the book as less about racism and more about specific processes of racialisation. To this end I draw on material from and beyond the book to illustrate the value of the concept 'racialisation' for understanding the afterlife of colonial divide and rule in South Africa and other former British colonies in Africa. I show the ways in which re-articulations of the 'signification-action complex' at the heart of processes of racialisation in post-1994 South Africa produce a politics of evasion as well as tensions between struggles for recognition on the one hand and on the other, struggles for justice and freedom. With these re-articulations come varying convergences-of claims of culture, belonging and victimhood, genomic science, jurisprudence and global discourse on indigenous rightsthat reify notions of 'race' and 'tribe'.

Cultural Dynamics, 2014

Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failur... more Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failures in particular sectors of the economy and at various levels of the social division of labour. This article situates the outcomes of affirmative action at the nexus of a series of contradictory processes: (a) increased wealth concentration among a few South Africans concurrent with growing local struggles among the poor about social exclusion from basic rights; (b) occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and injunctions to forget about ‘race’ and (c) the logics of debt inherent in neoliberalism, affirmative action and worn nationalism. This examination of the convergence of affirmative action with intensified neoliberal macroeconomic policies at South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy shows that affirmative action in post-1994 South Africa is about the state’s re-calibration of ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need’. These ...

Critical Philosophy of Race, 2017

This article provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines hist... more This article provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines historical landmarks in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South Africa that shaped anticolonial non-racialism. These reveal the ways colonial authorities used conversion to Christianity, “tribe,” and “race” to undermine resistance to colonialism, and they show that political approaches to anticolonial resistance were divided about (1) participation in colonial institutions for “Natives” and non-collaboration with the colonial state; (2) political mobilization on the basis of race, and non-racialism; and (3) assimilation into the Western, racialized capitalist order as British subjects, and a radical transformation of this order. Contrary to prevailing understandings that anticolonial non-racialism advocated forgetting, transcending and evading race, this article posits that it accounted for racialized difference, contested colonial uses of race, offered a radical critique of the idea o...

Transformation Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2012

Using a study about students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism at a m... more Using a study about students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism at a medical school in South Africa, this paper demonstrates that qualitative data analysis can be systematic, procedural and rigorous. The paper initially outlines the analytical procedures followed during the study. We then reflect on the value of these procedures in optimising our research outcome and finally we illustrate the development of our thinking by tracking steps in our analysis in relation to one cluster of key findings. We also note ways in which the qualitative software package NVivo contributed to systematic and rigorous practice. We conclude that in order to contribute to best practice in qualitative research, qualitative researchers need to make their analytical procedures transparent in research reports.

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2010

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2012

The colloquium entitled 'Revisiting Apartheid's Race Categories', held at the University of the W... more The colloquium entitled 'Revisiting Apartheid's Race Categories', held at the University of the Witwatersrand in October 2010, and from which this special issue emerged, was inspired by a debate 1 ignited in 2007, at the University of Cape Town (UCT), in the process of a review of its admissions criteria (see SAJHE 24 (2) 2010). Among these, particular attention was given to the University's use, as criteria for equitable admissions, of race categories legislated by apartheid's Population Registration Act No 30 of 1950. At the time, these were 'White', 'Native' and 'Coloured' with 'Indian' a subcategory of the latter. From 1951 the National Party used 'Bantu' instead of the category 'Native'. This became official policy from 1962 only to change again in 1978 from 'Bantu' to 'Black' (Horrell 1982). This use of the category 'Black' excluded people racially classified 'Coloured', referring only to those South Africans formerly classified 'Native' and 'Bantu' by apartheid law. In the 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement contested this narrow use of 'Black' defining it not as a race category or classification, but rather a global political identification premised on resistance to oppression in contexts of white supremacy. Post-1994 government policy and institutional practices in and out of government use various combinations of these conceptions of 'Black'. Contrary to popular perception that the categories are used to replace merit, the University of Cape Town uses the categories to situate the meaning of academic merit within the history of education under apartheid. Be that as it may, whether or not to continue using these categories remained a key question for the admissions review team in the context of the University's commitment to both non-racialism and equitable admissions.

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2012


South African Journal of Higher Education, 2007

Drawing on research among medical students at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Health... more Drawing on research among medical students at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Health Sciences, this article explores two questions: How do students and staff work with `race' in their relations to one another? What challenges do these relations pose for transformation? Data was gathered using in-depth interviews with forty-one students during 2001. Standard methodological and analytical procedures ensured increasing reliability and validity of the study. This study revealed an unyielding racialisation of every day life, consciousness and knowledge in the learning environment. The work of Frantz Fanon frames this analysis. It concludes staff and students work with a conception of `race' as a fixed essence. This presents certain chaIlenges for transformation: to free `race' from the grips of absolute difference; to articulate an expanded conception of `the human'; and to shift from the human family towards the human polity as a unit of solidarity. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 20 (3) 2006: 413-425

Journal of Social Issues, 2010

This article extends critiques of contact theory. It notes four deeper limitations: (1) what I ca... more This article extends critiques of contact theory. It notes four deeper limitations: (1) what I call a "psychometric imaginary"; (2) an assumption that "race" is given, homogeneous and stable; (3) contact/noncontact dualism; and (4) inattention to whiteness. These limitations locate contact theory within raciological thought, making contact a reformist, rather than transformative antiracist strategy. I suggest an alternative: a critical literacy for the use of "race." Contrary to Pettigrew's (1998) call for conceptual economy, I argue that conceptual expansion better serves understanding the tenacity of "race" and complexities of racism(s). Contrary to the psychometric imaginary of contact theory, I suggest that we need a visionary political imaginary for an antiracist world. I conclude that the key question for transforming intergroup relations in South Africa is not "which conditions," and "what kinds of" contact are necessary, but "what kinds of politics, knowing, seeing and belonging" are necessary for critical antiracist praxis. [T]he only appropriate response. .. is to demand liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking. (Gilroy, 2000, p. 40) This article departs from most in the present volume of Journal of Social Issues (in press). I argue that the contact hypothesis is not a transformative antiracist strategy. Even its revised forms remain trapped in raciological thought-various discourses that animate the idea of race (Ware, 2002a, p. 20). This calls for a "critical literacy" (Lee & Lutz, 2005, p. 4) for the use of "race" in order to disrupt and invent alternatives to this mode of thinking. (I put the word "race" in quotation

Anthropology Southern Africa, 2021

This report will be of value to those studying and researching transformation in higher education... more This report will be of value to those studying and researching transformation in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Over the past few years the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT embarked upon a series of transformation processes. Despite these efforts, students at Medical School continue to lodge complaints about racist practices on the part of staff at the School and to claim such practices undermine their learning and academic performance. Following some complaints lodged early in 2001, the Dean of the Faculty convened a meeting where a study was commissioned to provide a scan of issues to inform terms of reference for a panel to be tasked with an in-depth evaluation of processes of transformation at Medical School. These issues are specifically related to students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism

The Effects of Race, 2018

The issue of race as the issue of the Colonial Question, the Non-white-Native Question, the Negro... more The issue of race as the issue of the Colonial Question, the Non-white-Native Question, the Negro Question ... was and is fundamentally the issue of the genre of human, Man.-Sylvia Wynter (2003: 288) And lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and, I would go as far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.-Edward Said (2003: xii-xiii)

Theory, Culture & Society, 2020

How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and teleological acc... more How does Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the human depart from Western bio-centric and teleological accounts of the human? To grapple with this question I clarify five key concepts in her theory: the Third Emergence, auto- and socio-poiesis, the autopoietic overturn, the human as hybrid, and sociogenesis. I draw on parts of Wynter’s oeuvre, texts she works with and my conversations with Anthony Bogues. Wynter invents a Third Emergence of the world to mark the advent of the human as a hybrid being. She challenges Western conceptions that reduce the human to biological properties. In opposition to Western teleology, her counter-cartography of a history of human life offers a relational conception of human existence which pivots around Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogeny. She draws on Aimé Césaire’s call for a conception of the human made to the measure of the world, not to the measure of ‘Man’. This makes Wynter’s theory counter-, not post-humanist.

Persistence of Race, 2020

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, 2019

Listening has long been understood as characteristic of writing centre practice, and as central t... more Listening has long been understood as characteristic of writing centre practice, and as central to writing centre philosophy. This reflective progress report argues that such listening is also the 1 Corresponding author. Nichols et al. http://spilplus.journals.ac.za 132 generating culture of a university-wide writing programme of writing intensive courses, and that this culture will only be manifested and sustained if constantly modelled at all levels of the programme. In order to model what we teach, we need to build listening into the processes and structure of the programme as well as into the classrooms. Through letters from the invited coauthors of this paper, a snapshot is provided of the generative power of active listening in the teaching conversations between professor and writing fellows; lecturer, writing fellow and students; and writing fellows as a team as they create their lesson plan. Active listening is understood as a discipline of attentiveness to multiple and simultaneous meanings, and thus as a discipline which is necessary for complex thought and writing. Edward Said (2013) has described this attentiveness to simultaneity as key to a humanist critical literacy, which not only promotes engaged students and teachers but is also a political commitment to developing the citizen scholar. In the Wits Writing Programme, attentiveness to simultaneity represents a principle of teaching and of learning, an aim of writing, and a guiding value of the programme's construction.

Identities, 2019

In this response to Avtar Brah's review of Race Otherwise (2017) I briefly clarify the relationsh... more In this response to Avtar Brah's review of Race Otherwise (2017) I briefly clarify the relationship between the concepts 'racism', 'race' and 'racialisation'. I expand my framing of the book as less about racism and more about specific processes of racialisation. To this end I draw on material from and beyond the book to illustrate the value of the concept 'racialisation' for understanding the afterlife of colonial divide and rule in South Africa and other former British colonies in Africa. I show the ways in which re-articulations of the 'signification-action complex' at the heart of processes of racialisation in post-1994 South Africa produce a politics of evasion as well as tensions between struggles for recognition on the one hand and on the other, struggles for justice and freedom. With these re-articulations come varying convergences-of claims of culture, belonging and victimhood, genomic science, jurisprudence and global discourse on indigenous rightsthat reify notions of 'race' and 'tribe'.

Cultural Dynamics, 2014

Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failur... more Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failures in particular sectors of the economy and at various levels of the social division of labour. This article situates the outcomes of affirmative action at the nexus of a series of contradictory processes: (a) increased wealth concentration among a few South Africans concurrent with growing local struggles among the poor about social exclusion from basic rights; (b) occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and injunctions to forget about ‘race’ and (c) the logics of debt inherent in neoliberalism, affirmative action and worn nationalism. This examination of the convergence of affirmative action with intensified neoliberal macroeconomic policies at South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy shows that affirmative action in post-1994 South Africa is about the state’s re-calibration of ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need’. These ...

Critical Philosophy of Race, 2017

This article provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines hist... more This article provides a counter-history to liberal conceptions of non-racialism. It outlines historical landmarks in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South Africa that shaped anticolonial non-racialism. These reveal the ways colonial authorities used conversion to Christianity, “tribe,” and “race” to undermine resistance to colonialism, and they show that political approaches to anticolonial resistance were divided about (1) participation in colonial institutions for “Natives” and non-collaboration with the colonial state; (2) political mobilization on the basis of race, and non-racialism; and (3) assimilation into the Western, racialized capitalist order as British subjects, and a radical transformation of this order. Contrary to prevailing understandings that anticolonial non-racialism advocated forgetting, transcending and evading race, this article posits that it accounted for racialized difference, contested colonial uses of race, offered a radical critique of the idea o...

Transformation Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2012

Using a study about students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism at a m... more Using a study about students' experiences and perceptions of 'race' and racism at a medical school in South Africa, this paper demonstrates that qualitative data analysis can be systematic, procedural and rigorous. The paper initially outlines the analytical procedures followed during the study. We then reflect on the value of these procedures in optimising our research outcome and finally we illustrate the development of our thinking by tracking steps in our analysis in relation to one cluster of key findings. We also note ways in which the qualitative software package NVivo contributed to systematic and rigorous practice. We conclude that in order to contribute to best practice in qualitative research, qualitative researchers need to make their analytical procedures transparent in research reports.

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2010

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2012

The colloquium entitled 'Revisiting Apartheid's Race Categories', held at the University of the W... more The colloquium entitled 'Revisiting Apartheid's Race Categories', held at the University of the Witwatersrand in October 2010, and from which this special issue emerged, was inspired by a debate 1 ignited in 2007, at the University of Cape Town (UCT), in the process of a review of its admissions criteria (see SAJHE 24 (2) 2010). Among these, particular attention was given to the University's use, as criteria for equitable admissions, of race categories legislated by apartheid's Population Registration Act No 30 of 1950. At the time, these were 'White', 'Native' and 'Coloured' with 'Indian' a subcategory of the latter. From 1951 the National Party used 'Bantu' instead of the category 'Native'. This became official policy from 1962 only to change again in 1978 from 'Bantu' to 'Black' (Horrell 1982). This use of the category 'Black' excluded people racially classified 'Coloured', referring only to those South Africans formerly classified 'Native' and 'Bantu' by apartheid law. In the 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement contested this narrow use of 'Black' defining it not as a race category or classification, but rather a global political identification premised on resistance to oppression in contexts of white supremacy. Post-1994 government policy and institutional practices in and out of government use various combinations of these conceptions of 'Black'. Contrary to popular perception that the categories are used to replace merit, the University of Cape Town uses the categories to situate the meaning of academic merit within the history of education under apartheid. Be that as it may, whether or not to continue using these categories remained a key question for the admissions review team in the context of the University's commitment to both non-racialism and equitable admissions.

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2012


South African Journal of Higher Education, 2007

Drawing on research among medical students at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Health... more Drawing on research among medical students at the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Health Sciences, this article explores two questions: How do students and staff work with `race' in their relations to one another? What challenges do these relations pose for transformation? Data was gathered using in-depth interviews with forty-one students during 2001. Standard methodological and analytical procedures ensured increasing reliability and validity of the study. This study revealed an unyielding racialisation of every day life, consciousness and knowledge in the learning environment. The work of Frantz Fanon frames this analysis. It concludes staff and students work with a conception of `race' as a fixed essence. This presents certain chaIlenges for transformation: to free `race' from the grips of absolute difference; to articulate an expanded conception of `the human'; and to shift from the human family towards the human polity as a unit of solidarity. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 20 (3) 2006: 413-425

Journal of Social Issues, 2010

This article extends critiques of contact theory. It notes four deeper limitations: (1) what I ca... more This article extends critiques of contact theory. It notes four deeper limitations: (1) what I call a "psychometric imaginary"; (2) an assumption that "race" is given, homogeneous and stable; (3) contact/noncontact dualism; and (4) inattention to whiteness. These limitations locate contact theory within raciological thought, making contact a reformist, rather than transformative antiracist strategy. I suggest an alternative: a critical literacy for the use of "race." Contrary to Pettigrew's (1998) call for conceptual economy, I argue that conceptual expansion better serves understanding the tenacity of "race" and complexities of racism(s). Contrary to the psychometric imaginary of contact theory, I suggest that we need a visionary political imaginary for an antiracist world. I conclude that the key question for transforming intergroup relations in South Africa is not "which conditions," and "what kinds of" contact are necessary, but "what kinds of politics, knowing, seeing and belonging" are necessary for critical antiracist praxis. [T]he only appropriate response. .. is to demand liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking. (Gilroy, 2000, p. 40) This article departs from most in the present volume of Journal of Social Issues (in press). I argue that the contact hypothesis is not a transformative antiracist strategy. Even its revised forms remain trapped in raciological thought-various discourses that animate the idea of race (Ware, 2002a, p. 20). This calls for a "critical literacy" (Lee & Lutz, 2005, p. 4) for the use of "race" in order to disrupt and invent alternatives to this mode of thinking. (I put the word "race" in quotation