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. When are plant 'invaders' likely to become an urgent political issue? And, when they do, what might they reveal of the shifting relations among citizenship, community, and national sovereignty under neo-liberal conditions? Pursuing these questions in the 'new' South Africa, we posit three key features of postcolonial polities in the era of global capitalism: the reconfiguration of the subject-citizen, the crisis of sovereign borders, and the depoliticisation of politics. Under such conditions, we argue, 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 within a culture of 'post-racism' and civil rights.