Decoding Power: The Semiotics of Apartheid by Humairaa Mayet

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http://doi.org/10.332.34/SSR.23.14

^{Decoding Power: The Semiotics of Apartheid}

Humairaa Mayet

^{University of the Witwatersrand,  Johannesburg, South Africa}

^{Introduction: Why Semiotics?  Semiotics and International Relations There is very little, if any, overlap between Semiology and International Relations, even though they are both situated squarely in the Humanities. If I were to draw a Venn diagram to illustrate this phenomenon, each field of study would be an untethered circle, isolated entirely from the other. Semiotics, as the study of signs, has historically been concerned with symbolic texts and linguistic practices. International Relations, conversely, focuses on the material and legal aspects of states, institutions, and structures of power. The disjuncture between the two fields is striking. While scholars of International Relations examine treaties, wars, and the notion of sovereignty, a Semiotician analyses novels, gestures, and scenes in films. Yet these domains are not as far apart as the disciplinary boundaries imply. Apartheid is a political order rooted in International Relations, but cannot be understood in its entirety as such, as is colonial and indigenous self-determination. These, however, are also symbolic orders and as such, their semiotic dimensions must be recognised. Not only are apartheid states sustained by economic structures, law, and military power; they also rely on a complex nexus of signs from architectural codes and discursive stereotypes to racial codification and symbols of separation. To analyse apartheid without semiotics would be to overlook how profoundly its violence was encoded in meaning and representation. In the same vein, resistance to apartheid was also semiotic, cropping up in banned literature, murals, rituals, and slogans, constituting acts of counter-signification.}

 

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