Discomforting Necropolitics - Dance of the Dark City and Its Aesthetic Navigation Towards the Future of Afropolis Beyond Walls

Many of Achille Mbembe’s works delves into the contrast of solar and nocturnal faces of modern democracy. This double face lies starkly in the urban landscape of post-Apartheid Johannesburg. Yet, how do we understand the descending spiral of violence and exclusion reified by fortification of modernity ‘inside’ and policing of criminalized blackness ‘outside’? When such biopolitics continues to lock up our body in the past, how do we imagine the world beyond race? Can humanity fermented at the tense conjuncture of various political forces in South Africa in the course of anti-Apartheid struggles be a meaningful reference?

This paper delves into the performative power of the ‘nocturnal face’ by establishing a unique dialogue between Afro-American tradition exemplified by Michael Jackson’s ‘Moonwalker’ and its collaborative invitation of the ‘nightsongs’ - a performative tradition among the South African migrant workers – in the movie. These bodily articulations are going to be referred to as the ‘discomforting aesthetics’. It becomes a site of rupture of the enlightenment tradition of humanism by juxtaposing the colonial nightmare and fear that Apartheid politics desperately sought to unsee by the plasters of walls and segregation. In other words, this aesthetics is disruptive of the necropolitical disposal of humanity.

As a tense interface of various political and cultural forces that resisted Apartheid, the performative textuality of the movie offers an entry point to an alternative to the rational understanding of humanism and by its extension, Apartheid urban spatiality. In sum, this paper presents a glimpse of more humane and just future African metropolis, ‘Afropolis’, beyond walls of Othering, exclusion, and violence.