Narrating Constitutional Dis/Order in Post-1994 South Africa: A Critical Response to Theunis Roux

This comment takes up the invitation to critically engage Theunis Roux’s paper “Grand Narratives of Transition and the Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa”, focusing only on the latter of his two subject countries. Like Roux, I am interested in examining the impending collapse or fading of liberal constitutionalism as an emancipatory horizon for postcolonial futurity and regard this predicament as one of the major questions for legal, political and social theory today. As both the promises and premises of the South African constitution sustain deep fractures under the pressure of the intractable afterlife of colonial-apartheid and growing dissent against the founding myths of the post-apartheid legal order, we enter a problem-space that demands reckoning. Roux’s approach to this question is to stage an interlocution between what he regards as the two prominent competing grand narratives of postcolonial transition and democratic constitutionalism, which he respectively names the “liberal progressive” (mainstream) narrative (“LPN”) and the “culturalist” or “decolonial” (critical) narrative (“CGN”).