Naturing the Nation

Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State

Abstract

This paper examines the predicament of the postcolonial nation-state through the prism of environmental catastrophe: how is it that plant ‘invaders’ can become an urgent political issue, and what might this reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in relation to a case from the ‘new’ South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in an era of laissez-faire: the refiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticization of politics. Under such conditions, aliens - both plants and people - come to embody core contradictions of boundedness and belonging,' and alien-nature provides a language for voicing new forms of discrimination amidst a culture of ‘post-racism’ and civil rights.