This chapter assumes that the globally resurging nationalism, identity politics and xenophobia may be explicated by the conceptual dichotomy Purity-Impurity. South Africa is an especially apt case for such analysis. Twenty-five years after the transition, its inhabitants are still divided according to the apartheid categories and very modest progress has been made in breaking former barriers and changing attitudes. Yet, whereas apartheid was one of the foremost applications of a “politics of purity”, the Western Cape has also historically been one of the epicentres of creolisation. By means of an experimental cross-genre (literary and academic) approach, the apartheid vision of “separate development” is here interrogated as suppressed creolisation. The chapter is an abbreviated excerpt from a forthcoming diptych on creolisation vs. racialisation in South Africa.
This chapter is an abbreviated version of a chapter in the forthcoming monograph Contaminations and Ethnographic Fictions : Southern Crossings