Derek Hook, 'Apartheid's corps morcelé: the fantasmatic body underlying racist discourse'

This talk takes as its starting point the publication of an image of a destroyed body, and attempts to link this shocking image to a series of depictions of black bodies within the textual materials collected by the Apartheid Archive project. Attempting to link several methodological perspectives on an elusive theme - the fantasmatic 'body-in-pieces' as it exists in conditions of racism - the talk will draw variously on the theorizations of Frantz Fanon, historical narrative material, and interviews to present a case study of the image and its representational status in both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. The talk will prompt commentary on the question of what states of imagined embodiment underlie racist discourse, and encourage debate on the topic of the ethical utilization of such materials as means of disrupting more sanitized retrievals of the apartheid past.