Political Death and Neo-racism: Styles in Sizwe Bansi is Dead

Abstract

In his lectures in 1975-1976, Michel Foucault conceptualised the inclination to commit murders in political circumstances, and delineated it as ‘political death’ (2003).1 Such killings encompass both corporeal and psychological execution exercised through diverse means, for instance, murder, manslaughter, genocide, social ostracism and exposure to deadly environments. Apparently, today political death is implemented either through implicit biopolitical stratagems or overt violence by those who are already in power or those who attempt to gain power, and is prompted through phenomena such as racism, patriotism and xenophobia. This paper aims to examine ‘political death’ prompted by racism, and interrogates the ways and means by which these murders are actualised and rationalised, but ultimately rendered invisible in society, as represented in Athol Fugard’s Anglophone play-text, Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972). Set against the backdrop of the apartheid epoch, Fugard’s play focuses on the regulation and coercion of black populations by Afrikaner rulers in postcolonial South Africa. By analysing the play through Frantz Fanon’s, Foucault’s and Achille Mbembe’s lenses on biopolitics and racism, I argue that the concept of political death offers perspectives on biopolitical frameworks that foreground non-normative killings; dis- embodied deaths. The discussion creates a space to reflect meaningfully and critically on ‘living-dead’ conditions encountered by many populations today.