Diaspora-in-place as (dis)embodiment in Grant Farred’s <i>The Perversity of Gratitude</i>

These intellectuals gave him a life-sustaining "apartheid education" and the vital intellectual resources to both think about diaspora and actively negotiate (diasporic) movement beyond the physical, psychological, and philosophical strictures of apartheid.Farred's "apartheid education" is a worldly intellectual project that propels him to theorize diaspora in uniquely liberating ways when confronted by the abject politics of the South African state: " as disenfranchised students, we were transported out of Africa.Our CAD education gave us access to another world, a world beyond the racist strictures and systemic circumscriptions of apartheid, " he states. 1 The Department for Colored Affairs (CAD) was established by the apartheid regime on 23 October 1958 to sandwich South Africa's colored populations between white and black racial binaries in a targeted strategy of political disenfranchisement, racial oppression, othering, and cultural alienation.Consequently, as a member of South Africa's colored community, Farred's identity as a racialized Other was always already confined to the liminal space of in-betweenness, in the neither here nor there subject positionality of the disenfranchized Other.The act of thinking about diaspora while reading authors such as Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Blake and Durrell in his English classes (there is no mention of any women) and learning about African geography gave Farred the coping mechanisms to both negotiate the violent everydayness of apartheid and imagine more affirming spaces of freedom beyond South Africa.His CAD education enabled him to think about the im(possibility) of spatial enjambement between the here and the elsewhere while transforming his in-between-ness into a site of borderless spatiality: "We were free to leave." 2 This freedom offered a space to challenge and subvert conventional 1 Farred, The Perversity of Gratitude, 99. 2 ibid., 99.