Do South Africans Exist?: Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of the People Book

"Philosophically grounded, theoretically nuanced, politically controversial and yet urgently relevant, Do South Africans Exist? contains within its pages the four elements necessary to make it an absolute must read'. Focused on the question of what constitutes South Africanness, what makes us a nation, its argument is relevant to probably every major debate about contemporary South Africa. Ultimately this book is about the South African political experiment and the potential for its consolidation." —Adam Habib, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa "Do South Africans Exist? makes a sharp, original and distinctive contribution to the existing literature on nationalism and nation-building in South Africa. It traverses several disciplines—political philosophy, historicised political science, and critical theory—and in doing so, reintroduces the particular case of African nationalism into the more general understanding of nations and nationalism." —Colin Bundy, Green College, Oxford, U.K. "This book is a major contribution to political theory, of democracy and of nationalism, drawing upon a perceptive analysis of South African experience." —Goran Therborn, University of Cambridge, U.K. Do South Africans Exist? provides a critical study of South African nationalism against a broader context of African nationalism in general. It explores how an African "people" came into being in the first place, particularly in the South African context, as a collectivity organized group in pursuit of a political, and not simply cultural, end. The author argues that the nation is a political community whose form is given in relation to the pursuit of democracy and freedom, and that if democratic authority is lodged in "the people," what matters is the way that this "people" is defined, delimited, and produced. He argues that the nation precedes the state, not because it has always existed, but because it emerges in and through the nationalist struggle for state power. Ultimately, he encourages the reader to reevaluate knee-jerk judgments about the failure of modernity in Africa.

Ivor Chipkin received his PhD from the &201#;cole Normale Suprieure in Cachan (France). He is based at the Human Sciences Research Council, where he works on questions of citizenship, governance and democratization, but also teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa).