Apartheid

The word “apartheid,” translated literally from Afrikaans as “apartness,” has often existed in a dynamic tension between its ability to describe a particular sociohistorical experience in South Africa and its usefulness as an organizing concept that describes the convergence of settler colonialism and global capital. As a method of inquiry, black studies has been at the forefront of rethinking the notion of apartheid as exceptional, drawing parallels between the formation of racial capitalism in South Africa and elsewhere throughout the African diaspora (Bunche 1992; Vinson 2012; P. Andrews 2014).