Chloé Samala Faux
Chloé Samala Faux is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation, “African Renaissance as Primal Scene: Fantasies of Death and Rebirth after Apartheid,” interrogates the historical and emergent dilemmas of black reproductivity in post-apartheid South Africa by way of black critical thought, political economy and the institutional and intellectual developments of anthropology and psychoanalysis. Remarking a homology between originary accumulation, the incest taboo, and Frantz Fanon’s elaboration Negro Myth, the manuscript turns ethnographic scrutiny to the specters of sexual violence, illegal abortion, and the occult that dominate contemporary thematizations of South Africa’s crises in social reproduction. By way of the conjoined and redoubling discourses of psychoanalysis and anthropology, she 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. Chloé is also affiliated with The Institutes for Comparative Literature and Society and the Study for Sexuality and Gender.
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