Abstract Responding to an invitation to engage subaltern critiques of dominant universals, the coauthors of this essay reflect on the role of postcolonial national narratives of so-called color-blind multiculturalism in addressing historical and contemporary tensions between Black and Indian communities in South Africa. Through three intimate scenes—(1) making a cup of “impossible tea,” (2) unpacking the miseducation of Model-C(itizens), and (3) exploring the fraught construction of collective political nouns—the authors offer a generationally specific reading of Black and Indian solidarity. Staging a collaborative writing experiment, the authors play with form, offering an exploration of the epistemological, methodological, and affective challenges to reading Black and Indian relations in the wake of the July 2021 “unrest.” This intervention aims to contribute meaningfully to the effort to answer a complex question: “What are we seeing here?”
Mngomezulu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.