Paper short abstract:

Since the 'New South Africa' has often been described as “post-Apartheid” or “post-colonial”, this paper investigates the different meanings and implications of these notions in the production of “postracial discourses” drawing insights from debates in South African intellectual history.

Paper long abstract:

Following More’s (2022, 334) assertion that “ the ‘New South Africa” is often articulated as being “post-Apartheid”, “post-settler” or “post-colonial”, this paper investigates the different meanings of these terms and what they entail for the production of “postracial discourses” in Africa, using South Africa as a generic case of racial capitalism to draw insights on the limits of intellectual decolonisation on the continent. Indeed, the South African model of truth and reconciliation has been praised and spread around the world while it remained extremely contested within Pan-Africanist circles in and out of the country. Taking the South African debate on “nonracialism” as a point of departure to anchor my argument surrounding the uses and abuses of postracial rhetoric, I come back on the different intellectual traditions presiding over the definition of “African futures” within the South African context. I distinguish between postcolonial, Afrocentric and decolonial expressions of postracialism using Achille Mbembe’s intellectual trajectory from On the Postcolony (2001) and Critique of Black Reason (2013) to Brutalism (2020) as guiding thread towards understanding the limits of intellectual decolonisation and its detractors.