CRIMES OF THE COLONIAL PRESENT: Meditations on Xenophobia, Coloniality and Genocide

In postcolonial Africa, genocide, migration, xenophobia and representation are articulated under conditions of modernity and stand in a long history of anti-black racism and violence. Under what can be regarded as coloniality or 'the colonial presence,' both xenophobia and genocide are linked to subjectivity and representation. It is the contention of this paper that xenophobia in South Africa is linked to acts of localised xenophobia and genocide across the African continent chiefly through the epistemic violence of representation. Located in a constructionist position, representation is taken as violent and located in liberal institutions like the media that emerge as part of the racist modernity project (Lloyd 2019; Hall 1997). In this paper, I bring together postcolonial and decolonial theories to move between reading concrete historical events as captured in the archives of journalism and graffiti in urban spaces to think through ways in which xenophobia and genocide, beyond the physical violence, are articulated by and located in the epistemic violence of representation.