Prof. Paul Landau, PhD

This project deals with the mobilisations of anti-apartheid affect as a worldwide movement, creating and re-creating sacred-secular spaces of interaction. Following the exile of the African National Congress to Tanzania, Zambia, and other locations abroad, groups of activists formed in the United States, the United Kingdom, both Germanys - the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) -, and the Soviet Union, liaised with the ANC and agitated against the South African government's racist policies. The GDR Solidarity Committee drew on trade unions and student associations for support, while “disinvestment” activists in universities in the West, various Protestant churches, and the socialist-leaning British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) also organised events and campaigns. Exiled revolutionaries and activists from South Africa liaised with all of these groups across Cold War divisions, tying military preparation to a gathering public outcry.

H.-G. and I. Schleicher, Quinn Slobodian, Arianna Lissoni, and other historians, many working in the last five years, have mapped and charted much of this terrain. Up to now, however, the historiography of anti-apartheid has registered successes and failures according to vague internal logics in view of the intransigence of the apartheid system. My approach will be different, forefronting the sharing of meaning through iconic signs, the subsumption of contradictions in motives and aims, and the deferral of this-worldly benchmarks to secondary status. Anti-apartheid created social spaces held together by the absolute (and fully defensible) view of the target as evil, episodically connected by South African exiles and traveling university students. The initial aim is to sketch provisional ethnographies of particular efforts: modes of argument and agitation, performative components. Research is commencing in the archives of Freie Universität and Humboldt University in Berlin as well as of Leipzig University, of the activist churches, and in government records pertaining to anti-apartheid and the ANC.

My analysis will investigate comparatively studies of the birth and growth of other sacralised but non-religious phenomena, and so draw on sociology, anthropology, and performance- and visual media-studies, engaging scholarship from Talal Asad, Martin Jay, Charles Taylor, Philip Gorski, and the various participants and contributors to the "Multiple Secularities" forums and approaches.