The Moment of the Disqualified, 1980s–2000s

Abstract

“The Moment of the Disqualified, 1980s–2000s” turns to an underground cell from Wentworth drawn into spectacular acts of sabotage, including a beachfront car bombing that relegated its participants to a particular infamy. Alongside others from their milieu determined to “shoot back'” through documentary photography, the chapter argues that the “moment of the disqualified” offers a form of praxis that directly engages the relation among Blackness, negation, and revolution. These thinkers of the enduring racial ontologization of territory and personhood help one imagine the negation of apartheid's remains. The emergence of environmental struggle at apartheid's end was another attempt to bring into the domain of political consciousness another form of knowledge disqualified by the new/old state form that sublates (cancels and preserves) apartheid's racial capitalist forms. This brings the book full circle to its opening lines, as the residents see environmental justice as another form of disqualified knowledge/power.