The un/timely death(s) of Chris Hani: discipline, spectrality, and the haunting possibility of return

Abstract

This dissertation takes Chris Hani beyond the conventionally biographic by thinking through his multiple lives and deaths and engaging with his legacy in ways that cannot be contained by singular, linear narratives. By doing so, I offer alternative routes through which to understand historical change, political struggle and subjectivity, as well as biographical and historical production as a conflicted and contested terrain. I attend to these conflicting narratives not as a means through which to reconcile the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides of history, struggle, or the political subject. Nor to sacrifice either to what Frederick Jameson has referred to as a dialectical impasse: a “conventional opposition, in which one turns out to be more defective than the other”, and through “which only one genuine opposite exists… [therefore sharing] the sorry fate of evil… reduced to mere reflection.”1 Instead I place contested narratives about Hani and the anti-apartheid struggle into conversation with one another, and treat them as “equally integral component[s]”2 of the life and legacy of Hani.