Ties that Bind is an intriguing and long overdue book about race and friendship. It marks a time worldwide when virtual friendships are fast becoming the norm. And yet, after reading the chapters, one is left with a clearer sense of what it takes – or might take in the future – to actually be friends across race.
Sarah Nuttall is author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship.

Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

List of figures

 Fanon’s Secret  Gabeba Baderoon

• Thinking about Race and Friendship in South Africa Jon Soske and Shannon Walsh
• With Friends like These: The Politics of Friendship in Post -Apartheid South Africa Sisonke Msimang
• Bound to Violence: Scratching Beginnings and Endings with Lesego Rampolokeng  Stacy Hardy and Lesego Rampolokeng
• Afro-Pessimism and Friendship in South Africa: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson III  Shannon Walsh
• The Impossible Handshake: The Fault Lines of Friendship in Colonial Natal , 1850–1910 J. Tallie
• The Problem with ‘We’: Affiliation, Political Economy, and the Counterhist ory of Nonracialism Franco Barchiesi
• Affect and the State : Precarious Workers, the Law, and the Promise of Friendship Bridget Kenny
• ‘A Song of Seeing’: Art and Friendship under Apartheid  Daniel Magaziner
• ‘Friend of the Family’: Maids, Madams, and Domestic Cartographies of Power in South African Art Neelika Jayawardane
• Corner Loving: Ways of Speaking about Love  MADEYOULOOK
• Kutamba Naye: In Search of Anti-Racist and Queer Solidarities Tsitsi JajiThe Native Informant Speaks Back to the Offer of Friendship in White Academia  Mosa Phadi & Nomancotsho Pakade

 Acknowledgments

 Contributor biographies

 Index

Shannon Walsh is a filmmaker and assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film, University of British Columbia, Canada and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg’s South African Research Chair in Social Change.

Jon Soske is assistant professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University and a research associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand. He is co-editor of One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today and Apartheid Israel: The Politics of An Analogy.

Ties that Bind is an intriguing and long overdue book about race and friendship. It marks a time worldwide when virtual friendships are fast becoming the norm. And yet, after reading the chapters, one is left with a clearer sense of what it takes – or might take in the future – to actually be friends across race.
Sarah Nuttall is author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid

Ties that Bind exhibits a supple and historically nuanced approach to friendship, attentive to the parameters of friendship as a feeling, an ideal, an institution, and as a set of concrete practices for different communities at different moments in time … The ‘Afro-pessimism’ framework privileged in the collection will undoubtedly provoke debate but the contributions in this collection should be read and engaged with by people across a wide spectrum.

Kerry Bystrom author of Democracy at Home in South Africa: Family Fictions and Transitional Culture

Twenty-one years after full democracy in South Africa, questions are emerging more clearly and volubly now than ever before as to the nature of South African politics and friendship. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the dispensation unfurled by the negotiated settlement are being challenged. Ties that Bind emerges with the right questions at the right time.

Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Lecturer, English, University of Cape Town and Visiting Researcher, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research

Review in LSE Blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/09/25/book-review-ties-that-bind-race-and-the-politics-of-friendship-in-south-africa-edited-by-shannon-walsh-and-jon-soske/

1. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/09/25/book-review-ties-that-bind-race-and-the-politics-of-friendship-in-south-africa-edited-by-shannon-walsh-and-jon-soske/

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