African Studies Annual Lecture 2025: The Becoming Technical of the Human: Race After Apartheid

Convener: Rebekah Lee, Director, African Studies Centre

Speaker: Premesh Lalu, University of the Western Cape

With Drinks Reception to follow in the Investcorp Gallery

Stuart Hall’s recasting of “race as a floating signifier” has paved the way for a return to the problematisation of apartheid in South Africa and those racial formations that follow in its wake.  Taking my cue from Hall, I argue that shifts in the co-evolution of the human and technology beginning with the abolition of slavery and passing through the rise of experimental psychology (later psychotechnics), and cybernetics may better explain the rise of biopolitical projects such as apartheid. These shifts significantly altered and constituted the meaning of race as a site of stasis, or permanent civil war. In this lecture I revisit three theatrical works by William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company – Faustus in Africa, Woyzeck on the Highveld, and Ubu and the Truth Commission – to explore the fate of the subject caught in the double binds of race and technology. Rather than seeking reprieve in a politics of transcendence, a perspective of the technical becoming of the human locates apartheid in a global conjuncture where the work of its undoing may proceed.

Professor Premesh Lalu is Research Professor and British Academy-National Research Foundation UK-SA Digital Humanities Chair in Culture and Technics at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. Lalu is the former director and convenor of the Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities in the CHR. He is the author of The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009), and Undoing Apartheid (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).