A rattle: On the other frontier and Chabani Manganyi's "Making Strange"

This paper reflects on Chabani Manganyi’s “Makingstrange: Race science and ethnopsychiatric discourse” onthe occasion of its republication in PINS. “Making strange”is placed in relation to the critique of what Marxist revisionisthistorian, Martin Legassick called the liberal frontiertradition of South African historiography, a tradition thatposited the eighteenth century frontier of the Cape colonyas the origin of South African race prejudice. Thinking aboutthe implications of this critique for critical psychology,specifically for psychoanalytically inclined scholarship, thepaper pursues what Manganyi calls “another beginning” ofwhat he names as a “chain of discourse which is sometimesdescribed as colonial discourse”. The paper poses the basic question of what constitutes the links in this “chain”.