The Fire This Time: How Policing Holds Together Race, Space, and Time.

• In Event: Critical Issues in Historical and Transnational Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines how the policing of Black bodies within urban white spaces in apartheid South Africa worked to construct and maintain racial-spatial understandings of modernity, where modernity is conceptualized as dominant notions of space, place, and time since European conquest. Drawing on materials from the Mayibuye (Robben Island) archives and the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town, I find that Black South Africans were criminalized and subsequently policed in ways that upheld the racial geographies that underpin modernity. I argue that the physical presence of Blackness in or moving through white South African space troubled the racial-spatial understandings of modernity because Blackness was read as belonging to antiquity or a future problem for urban white space. Thus, Blackness was policed according to two seemingly contradictory ideals. One, Blackness is a pre-historic and rural entity, and its mere presence in urban white space ruptures notions of time, being, and civility. Second, Blackness is read as future criminality waiting to strike and needs to be removed before it causes the collapse of white urban space.

Author

• Korey Tillman, Northeastern University