ABSTRACT
Images circulating in contemporary South Africa belie the linear narrative of progress held by the dominant ideology of Rainbowism in which apartheid at one point reigned and then ended. This chapter reads the selected imagery from the Marikana massacre−in which a striking miner is portrayed as a phobogenic object and source of menace—and the other from the Reitz Four incident of 2007−in which black university housekeepers and janitors are represented as enjoying their own humiliation at the hands of white students. Guided by the analytic of Afro-Pessimism, this chapter argues that the ideology of Rainbowism is a form of post-apartheid nostalgia that is ironically coopted by a commonsense of anti-blackness. What is identified in the selected memory images are the limitations and failures of post-racialism and their concomitant simulations of redress and progress. This chapter frames the selected scenes as emerging from the ordinary non-event of black abjection that accumulates and ruptures into the realm of spectacle. What plays out in the selected visual scenes fits a more cyclical colonial temporality and a black grammar of suffering that reliably recycles old patterns and their familiar affects that position black bodies as fungible and nonhuman.
