Madiba Magic: Politics as Enrichment

This talk revisits the symbolic politics of South Africa's "Mandela Moment": The early post-apartheid years, marked by a national euphoria, within a horizon of incipient dread. Repeated talk of Mandela's "magic" and the "miracle" of the country's transition to democracy produced a particular emotional style of politics, inseparable from wider reaches of political enchantment. Posel was the founding director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of Witwatersrand.Please RSVP to Nancy Robbins by Friday, March 29.