Premesh Lalu. Undoing Apartheid. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023. 202 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.95. Paper. ISBN: 978-1-509-55283-2.

Premesh Lalu's Undoing Apartheid overviews how contemporary South African cultural workers have dealt with the legacies of the system.It is rooted in attention to concepts of myth and imagined facts that undergirded the system and continue to undergird South African concepts of race and identity as fixed.Moving from Greek theater to Faust, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and contemporary work, Undoing Apartheid ambitiously-yet succinctly!-situates the apartheid system within both real and imagined paradigms.Lalu narrates the process through six chapters, aiming to show how apartheid became part of South Africa's core identity and explaining why it remains there today.The introductory first chapter, "Apartheid's Double-binds," of course lays this out.Lalu begins by examining what he calls apartheid's "mythic core," that which has cemented the system in the country's memory and identity.He then leads to a discussion of how the book focuses on "benign" petty apartheid, which impacted everyday lives more but which receives less scholarly attention than grand apartheid.This paradigm brings about methodological paradigms, Lalu tells us, because petty apartheid is "mostly unavailable as a trace in the archive."Through the lens of Richard Rives's novel Emergency Continued, readers encounter the trojan horse concept, thinking about ways in which petty apartheid affected people as an outcome of grand apartheid and in which, due to this unavailability in the archive, cultural work becomes a necessary lens.He concludes the chapter by thinking about literary theory and art critiques as mechanisms for better understanding the day-to-day lives and impacts of the system.Chapter Two, "Apartheid's Mythic Precursors," asks readers to rethink the paradigm of apartheid as a natural outcome of South African history.Rebutting scholars such as Leonard Thompson, who argued that Calvinism is key to understanding Afrikaner nationalism, Lalu argues that myth represents a more significant container.Apartheid, he argues, basically constitutes an imagined set of facts related to race and social regulation.He situates the ability to imagine apartheid precisely within its early twentieth-century context.Thinking about technological anxieties and/or global war as core parts of bringing about the system, Lalu leads us to ask whether this need for social control and myths built to surround it are products of the deus ex machina environment in which the system was born and thrived.Chapter Three, "The Return of Faust," brings us then more deeply into conversations about apartheid.Introducing cultural products ranging from William Kentridge's play on Faust, to Goethe, to wondering whether Marx viewed colonialism as a discourse on technological futurity or