We Are not South African

Mediating National Identity in a Postcolonial and Postapartheid State

Rachel Lara Van Der Merwe (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

198 Seiten

2026
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-1-9788-4297-7 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. April 2026)
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We Are Not South African explores how national identity functions as a colonial tool of communication, control, and power. Author Rachel Lara van der Merwe examines how humans and the planet are integrally shaped by the idea of the nation, and speculates on how different sociopolitical imaginaries, instead of the nation, could inform ways of being-together in the world.

Linking national identity to colonialism, the book broadens the idea of the nation to include its impact on all forms of life, human and more-than-human. Van der Merwe builds her argument on three central observations: that nations are made up of conflicting and fractured imaginaries, not unified, cohesive ones; the nation is divisive by nature, tracing back to its colonial origins; and the nation, along with the state, exploits both humans and more-than-humans. In order to build a more just and sustainable planetary society, she argues, liberation from such colonial formations is vital. In response, the book asks: How could we reimagine how we organize our societies through values of relationality and mutual care rather than rigid borders? What sociopolitical imaginaries do we need, or already possess, that might inform new configurations of community?

Rachel Lara van der Merwe is an assistant professor in the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State.

List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Imagining the Social, Imagining the Nation
Chapter 3: Unsettling, Delinking, and Staying with the Trouble
Chapter 4: Struggling over the Idea of South Africa
Chapter 5: National Identity from Afar
Chapter 6: Emigration as Extraction
Chapter 7: Remediating Water: From a Medium of Life to a National Resource
Chapter 8: Colonial Water in the Cape
Chapter 9: Protocols of Planetary Translation
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	14.4.2026
Zusatzinfo	4 color figures
Verlagsort	New Brunswick NJ
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	1-9788-4297-X / 197884297X
ISBN-13	978-1-9788-4297-7 / 9781978842977
Zustand	Neuware