A turn to the discourse of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa turns out to be a (re)turn to classical anthropology and leads to a consideration of the structural contradictions that organize nationalist discourse in the “postcolony” that remains a settler colony. This paper takes as its point of departure a conceptual dependency on a universal category of “woman” that cannot not account for the un-rapeability of Black women. Thus, brought into focus is a methodological problematic of attending to sexual violence against Black women under colonial capitalist modernity in terms other than its erasure. The pursuit of this methodological problem leads to a pursuit of the ethnographic implications therein.

The ethnographic gesture, a Kantian inheritance, which shuttles between the particular – so-called “lived experience” – and a generalizable, transcendental principle – is in pursuit of a mediating third term: culture. And it is in pursuit of a mediating third term that I interrogate the concept of “rape culture” as a figuration of the limit of the anthropological axiom that culture is premised on the legitimation of some forms of violent access to women and the foreclosure of others via the incest taboo – that unlocatable process and fantasized moment of rupture from nature that culture was “born.” While rape confuses this boundary, I argue that opposing rape through recourse to the rights of women is coextensive with the system that permits both the legalization and the confusion of the law of violence against Black women – in capitalist colonial modernity.

In the idiom of the ethnographic, the paper weaves together intimate and public discourses around sexual violence in contemporary South Africa, scenes of coming-of-age under apartheid, and Fanon’s elaboration of the psychosexual arrangement of colonial society. In turn, it scrutinizes the fantasies of racial hatred and racial reconciliation that the concept of “rape culture” engenders in order to bring into focus the endurance of the axiom that organizes the false universalism of woman: “Whoever says rape says Black man.” Moving between the paradigm of “rape culture” and its impossible application for Black women, the paper traces connections between the (im)possibility of attending to the lived experience of anti-Blackness and the psychical structuring of the social field, enabled by and echoed in anthropological discourse. In the final instance, the Black woman about whom Fanon knows “nothing” marks the point of departure for an (im)possible ethnography in the zone of non-being.

Chloé Samala Faux is the Provost’s Postdoctoral Equity Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Wesleyan University. She creates social theory by bringing anthropological inquiry into conversation with interventions from Black critical theory, Marxism and psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, to investigate the conditions of Black life and death under capitalist modernity. By way of the conjoined and redoubling discourses of psychoanalysis and anthropology, her current book project interrogates the psychosexual and sociopolitical (re)-structuring of the family, to understand both the failures of “transition” in South Africa and the insufficiencies of the culturalism that animates much Black radical criticism.