For decades the global gaze on South African society invariably focused on it as a symbol of the inevitable excesses of social engineering, racism and violence under the apartheid dispensation; with astonishment at the apparent exceptionalism of the ‘miracle’ transition that occurred to democratic rule and the dismantling of apartheid; and, more recently, on the resurgence of newer manifestations of racialisation and violence in post-apartheid South Africa. This book recognises and confronts this complex history of racialised oppression, as well as the future possibilities and impossibilities of transforming South African society through a re-engagement with the apartheid archive – an archive that allows us to understand the continued impact of the past on our present social, subjective and psychological realities.