ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and James Scott to present an alternative understanding of hegemony and subaltern resistance. It traces three discourses into the first half of the twentieth-century, during which the construction of the subaltern as the 'savage Other', 'tribally-divided Other', and 'laboring Other' were inscribed into a systematic moral and political knowledge/power system of subaltern control and administration. The book explains the development of Apartheid by situating it within what was considered 'the tradition' of the dominant; the discourses of the subaltern 'Other'. The locating of Apartheid within the construct of 'the tradition' explains how and why the 'influx' of the subaltern into the urban areas and the emergence of a poor white class constituted a crisis for the ruling group.
