Race scholarship on apartheid flourished only after apartheid’s fall.

Evidence

As always, the emergence of a new research agenda cannot be separated from the political moment: it seems no accident that the subject of race in apartheid should be more extensively researched in the wake of its defeat than during its ascendancy. But there are also theoretical factors at play here, deriving from the influence of theoretical critiques of Marxism, particularly postmodern and postcolonial modes of theorizing, closely attuned to issues of identity, discourse, and the intersections of the two. Even for those of us who remain sceptical about the overall merits of these bodies of theory, the controversies which they have generated have had a profound impact in foregrounding new sorts of questions and animating more diverse research areas. However in retrieving the subject of race, we should not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater: whatever the economistic excesses of the past, the central concern should surely be to root racial discourses in their material contexts, so as to understand the complex and shifting interconnectedness of race and class, along with the other processes that crisscross our lives, such as gender and ethnicity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 596

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The claim that political defeat enables scholarship parallels Milgrom’s point that institutions and intellectual agendas respond to historical moments.
• DEEPTHINKING: A compact statement of the dialectic between political moment and theory, plus a methodological warning against abandoning material context — worth sitting with for the way it holds postmodern critique and economistic analysis in productive tension.

Related

• Race scholarship on apartheid grew mainly after the regime’s defeat (similarity 0.94)
• Race-focused research on apartheid is recent and still early-stage (similarity 0.85)
• Apartheid historiography avoided defining race, treating it as residual or given (similarity 0.84)
• Apartheid scholarship flourished directly in response to state oppression (similarity 0.83)
• Little research has probed the social meanings of race under apartheid (similarity 0.83)
• Anti-apartheid scholars displaced race with class precisely because race was so pervasive. (similarity 0.82)
• The canonical race-class debate on apartheid actually diverted attention away from race (similarity 0.81)
• Apartheid scholarship defined race negatively as whatever is not class, never positively. (similarity 0.81)
• The apartheid of race has been subsumed into an apartheid of class (similarity 0.81)
• By the 1980s apartheid was framed as a distinct form of racial capitalism (similarity 0.81)
• Liberal apartheid scholarship treated racism chiefly as instrumental to Afrikaner nationalist power (similarity 0.81)
• Apartheid scholarship neglected race itself until recently, leaving whiteness and hidden transcripts unstudied. (similarity 0.81)
• South African society needs race war analysis beyond classical class struggle. (similarity 0.81)
• Apartheid emerged from South Africa’s modernizing history, not an anomaly (similarity 0.80)
• Class-centered apartheid scholarship treated race’s relative autonomy as conceded but never analyzed. (similarity 0.80)