This lecture will offer a genealogy of political modernity: the nation-state and the colonial state were constructed at the same time through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The lecture will provide a historical analysis, starting with the colonization of North America and concluding with the anti-apartheid struggle, an unfinished pursuit of a state without a nation. What lessons does the anti-apartheid struggle offer for the contemporary world?
