In Apartheid Remains, Sharad Chari explores how people handle the remains of segregation and apartheid in South Africa as witnessed through portals in an industrial-residential landscape in the Indian Ocean city of Durban. Through long-term historical and ethnographic research, Chari portrays South Africa’s twentieth century as a palimpsest that conserves the remains of multiple pasts, including attempts by the racial state to remake territory and personhood while instead deepening spatial contradictions and struggles. When South Durban’s denizens collectively mobilized in various ways---through Black Consciousness politics and other attempts at refusing the ruinous articulation of biopolitics, sovereignty, and capital---submerged traditions of the Indian Ocean and the Black Atlantic offered them powerful resources. Of these, Chari reads Black documentary photography as particularly insightful audiovisual blues critique. At the tense interface of Marxism, feminism, and Black study, he offers a method and form of geography attentive to the spatial and embodied remains of history. Apartheid Remains looks out from South Durban to imaginations of abolition of all forms of racial capitalism and environmental suffering that define our planetary predicament.

“In the years during which he researched and wrote this book, Sharad Chari practiced a long nearness to people and places subjected to apartheid’s technologies of unmattering, which aimed to rob them of any meaning. From his insistent being with has come a magnificent, important work of great erudition and political amplitude and also the rare qualities of tenderness and solace.” - Gabeba Baderoon, author of (Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-apartheid) “In this capacious book, Sharad Chari traces the palimpsest of apartheid rule by giving us a chilling analysis of liberal formations of biopolitical subjection and their enduring power. And yet, Chari ensures that this is a book about political hope, illuminating movements, struggles, and insurgencies that constitute a genealogy of revolution. We need both in the times at hand: to better understand liberal government and its refusals and rebellions.” - Ananya Roy, Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy, University of California, Los Angeles "Apartheid Remains provides a detailed history of the communities under scrutiny and does so both through broad-strokes history and through the moving personal profiles of the subjects he encounters. . . . It is an intellectual feat of no small proportion." - Grant Farred (Antipode) "Apartheid Remains is a moving and eloquently written ethnography . . . . It is essential reading for anyone seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted legacies of apartheid and its enduring influence on the present . . . ." - Bastien Dratwa (Urban Studies)

Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley; Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER); and author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India.