Decolonisation and affective worlds: On the worldmaking potential of shame and rage in the South African “post”-apartheid present

This long-term project, with it’s focus on affect, particularly melancholy, shame and rage, is located in a feminist decolonial framework and is aimed at disrupting gender, raced and other entangled binaries and associated violences. Our goal here is to take affect and embodiment seriously, thus rethinking colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal capitalist logics and (re)making alternatives within the academy and the larger social imaginary and materiality. We are interested here in the affective worlds of South African women and other marginal groupings, particularly, how these are entangled with larger affective and political productions; how affect becomes embodied and material and is deployed to reproduce and rationalize, but also to disrupt and resist, inequalities and violences, including both social and environmental injustices. A primary focus is on whiteness and femininity, often under-theorised in South Africa, given the transparency of privileged subjectivities, towards gaining a more complex understanding of the recalcitrant logics and technologies of white power and privilege in contemporary contexts. Our project is informed by transdisciplinary and trans-modal scholarship, and draws on a wide range of theory including psychoanalysis, post-/decolonial, indigenous and post-humanist thinking. We direct our work here towards a co-authored book The Book of Shame that has been invited by a Women and Psychology Routledge series. Two further related publications will be part of the residency: Professor Kruger’s The Book of Rage will be launched and Professor Shefer’s manuscript Affective Engagements with Oceans will be initiated during the time of the proposed residency.