1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910790955303321

Autore

Hansen Thomas Blom <1958->

Titolo

Melancholia of freedom [[electronic resource] ] : social life in an Indian township in South Africa / / Thomas Blom Hansen

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, : Princeton University Press, 2012

ISBN

1-4008-4261-1

9786613589873

1-280-49464-6

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (373 p.)

Disciplina

305.891/41068455

Soggetti

East Indians - South Africa - Durban

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa) Race relations

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa) Social conditions

Chatsworth (Durban, South Africa) Religion

Durban (South Africa) Race relations

Durban (South Africa) Social conditions

Durban (South Africa) Religion

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Under the gaze: freedom and race after apartheid -- Ethnicity by fiat: the remaking of Indian life in South Africa -- Domesticity and cultural intimacy -- Charous and Ravans: a story of mutual nonrecognition -- Autonomy, freedom, and political speech -- Movement, sound, and body in the postapartheid city -- The unwieldy fetish: Desi fantasies, roots tourism, and diasporic desires -- Global Hindus and pure Muslims: universalist aspirations and territorialized lives -- The saved and the backsliders: the Charou soul and the instability of belief -- Postscript: Melancholia in the time of the "African personality".

Sommario/riassunto

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined



enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after. Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.