Keeping you post-ed: Space-time regimes,metaphors,and post-apartheid

Abstract

Societies that have undergone systemic change are characterized as ‘post’—post-socialist, post-colonial, etc.—to encapsulate the impact the past still has on their structure and functioning. Research on these societies has therefore tended to adopt a mostly temporal approach, investigating the tension between continuity and change. Using the example of post-apartheid South Africa, I make a case for a more balanced approach to post situations by including space as equally valuable. I draw my theoretical inspiration from Hartog’s notion of regimes of historicity and Massey’s space-time to argue that we should investigate space-time regimes. I show that a space-time regime of entanglement, often passéist, with blurred temporal boundaries and messy, place-bound experiences of time, characterizes post situations. Finally, using South Africa as my empirical grounding, I offer a set of metaphors to describe and analyze the concrete places that this entangled, post space-time produces.