Sharad Chari. Apartheid Remains. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. xxxv + 460 pp. Maps. Index. $32.95. Paper. ISBN: 9781478030416.

Prelude: What Remains?"Only one of the photographs is an individual portrait -of an elderly woman named Hafiza Reebee, clutching an inhaler she uses to deal with the chronic asthma she endured as a result of pollution from the nearby oil refinery.The only photograph that includes anyone known to history beyond the immediate community shows a young Robert McBride gazing off into space as one of six "Young people in conversation, Wentworth, 1983."This focus on the quotidian, what Chari calls the daily "texture of life," typifies Chari's approach in his brilliant historical excavation of the human geography of the South Durban communities of Merebank and Wentworth over more than a century.The ultimate purpose of the book hinges on the pun of the title.On the one hand, Chari is like an archaeologist working through the remains of apartheid and earlier segregation at the particular site of Merebank and Wentworth.On the other hand, he is making a more polemical point about the way apartheid currently persists in the form of environmental racism and social marginalization.While the photographic essay stresses the human involvement in the communities' geography, the nine detailed maps that follow provide a cartographic summary of how municipal authorities-whether colonial, apartheid, or postapartheid planners-produced not only racial space but also new possibilities for resistance.Through his palimpsestic examination of these few square miles of marginalized space, Chari presents a narrative, almost novelistic in its attention to subjectivity, that encapsulates an improbably comprehensive account of the last 150-plus years of South African history and how the biopolitical forces of successive governments have shaped that history.The scope of the book is even broader, as the story of Merebank begins with the establishment of Indian communities from the 1860s on.This allows Chari to bring Indian Ocean historiography into conversation with the kind of Black Atlantic theorizing that has tended to dominate thinking about South African race relations.Within the parameters of apartheid's social engineering, Merebank and Wentworth were, respectively, Indian and Coloured communities.Chari's first chapter, however, explains that in the first decade of the twentieth century, the space was also the site of British concentration camps where Afrikaner women and children were interned-and where hundreds died.Although the memorials for those particular spaces are now not easy to find, they are also a part of the apartheid