Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower

Abstract

I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an instantiation of a particular normative order, wherein contagion was used to justify the movement of black, homeless people outside of the city’s cordon sanitaire. This is resonant of apartheid racial segregation in which the fear of race mixing is sometimes described in terms of contagion where whiteness represents that which is pure while blackness that which is dirty and infectious. Despite this desire for racial separation, apartheid biopower depends on exploitable black labour to sustain white domination. The figurative work of racial contagion is then undercut when the black worker is to be present and available in white areas to work. Neoliberal modes of power inherit the dual work of race and contagion in apartheid when the poor and black are let to die.