Do South Africans Exist?

Ivor Chipkin is the founding director of the Public Affairs Research Institute linked to the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, which has been a pioneer in the field of institutional studies in South Africa, bringing social science methods to the study of government and how it works. He was an associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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'. Focussed 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 spiky, 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. Chipkin uses lively, forceful prose to handle complex issues. - COLIN BUNDY, Green College, Oxford, UK 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, UK

• AcknowledgementsList of AcronymsIntroduction: The Sublime Object of NationalismChapter 1: The Nature of African NationalismChapter 2: The Democratic Origin of Nations Chapter 3: African Nationalism in South AfricaChapter 4: The South African NationChapter 5: The Impossibility of the National CommunityChapter 6: The Production of the Public DomainChapter 7: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Identity of ‘the People’ Conclusion: Notes Towards a Theory of the Democratic LimitEndnotesBibliographyIndex