An Assembly of the Stellenbosch University Graduate School · and what remains after it
deferralwithoutdenial
An interdisciplinary assembly on waiting as power distributed as time (Part One)
Monday 9 November 2026 · Lecture Hall, Department of Journalism · Stellenbosch
A refusal has an author, a date and a reason, and can therefore be challenged. A delay has none of these — and an applicant who has waited for years has suffered something that functions as refusal while remaining, formally, nothing at all.
Meet the presenters Join the audience Lunch and refreshments are provided — on the day’s own terms.
Waiting as a category for the humanities.
This project’s premise is that waiting is not an experience of time but a relation of power distributed as time: one party’s capacity to act is suspended pending another’s decision, and the suspension is felt as duration only by the one who does not decide.
Three claims organise the enquiry. That delay is a technique of government rather than a failure of administration. That waiting is the form power takes when it wishes to be unattributable — which is why it is so difficult to litigate. And, centrally, that there are two waitings, formally identical and politically opposite: waiting imposed and waiting chosen. The applicant in the queue and the poet who waits for words to arrive occupy the same posture and not the same position. Telling them apart is the critical task, because the rhetoric of patience works by making the first resemble the second.
Waiting offers a third term through which incommensurable situations may be related without asserting equivalence: apartheid influx control and the Chinese household registration system cannot be equated, but the temporal arrangements they impose can be read together — as can the queue and the delivery algorithm, two faces of one operation.
Those ‘who race against time have no seasons.’Wang Jibing, The Man Racing Against Time (2023) — the delivery rider: a man not made to wait but forbidden to
Ons tel voëltjies – we count little birds. In Loeriesfontein, waiting has become a wage. People count the dead beneath the turbine blades while the rule to stop is deferred.Loeriesfontein residents, household survey, 2019, and the author, SP Borchardt — Theme V, The infrastructure does not wait
“…this glorious house, where I was once a bride, richly filled with the best that life can offer… I shall always remember it, even in my dreams”Homer, Odyssey 21.77–79 — Penelope’s words to the suitors, announcing the bow contest — Theme III, I wait for “Noman”
“The delay has no individual author, yet its consequences are carried by unidentified people, searching families, and those left without the power to end it.”Elysia Greenway, Waiting to Be Named (2026) — responsibility disperses, while the experience of waiting remains embodied — Theme IV, Waiting to Be Named
The programme is set: eight themes, eight presenters, in running order — four juxtapositions, from a permit beside a novel to a broken bowl beside a love deferred. Each began in the presenter’s own research; the theme bent to the material. The ninth card belongs to the room. Meet the presenters on the Assembly slate; see the clock on the day.
I
The Home Affairs file that is never refused and never granted — delay as lived practice in South African law.
June Luna
II
Ha Jin’s Waiting and diasporic home always deferred; Wang Jibing’s rider in The Man Racing Against Time (2023).
Dr Bo Lyu
III
The waiting woman: Homer’s Penelope and the heroism of staying behind — read with Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Elisabeth Eybers.
Dr Louise-Mari Muller
IV
Unidentified remains, searching families and the time between — forensic facial depiction, and who is given the possibility of identification.
Dr Elysia Greenway
V
Ecologies: managed incompleteness — wind farms authorised before their toll on birds and bats is known. Knowledge waits for the infrastructure.
Dr Stephanie Borchardt
VI
Light-travel delay and the early universe — when “too long to wait” is written into physics — then a mathematical model of why most of a life is waiting, and how one prepares for the chances.
Prof. Yin-Zhe Ma
VII
Waiting in French literature: ‘patience’ as a form of self-denial in Jeanne Benameur’s La patience des traces (2022).
Jaco du Plooy
VIII
Henri-Pierre Roché’s second novel: the impact of deferral on nascent love, captured through parallel juxtaposition.
Prof. Catherine Du Toit
15:50
The Assembly puts its own title on trial: the motion is put to the whole room, in its three positions. Judgment is reserved.
Everyone in the room
A seminar ends when the chairs are stacked. A participatory Assembly leaves evidence. Four outcomes, numbered from zero:
0
The website
The call, the themes, the record — you are reading outcome zero now, and it stays.
2
The debate
A standing public forum, and the Assembly’s only question time: questions are filed there and wait for an answer — open now at The debate.