The ‘post’ as powerful specific vocabulary

On several occasions through her article, ‘Keeping You Post-ed: Space-Time Regimes, Metaphors, and Post-Apartheid’, Houssay-Holzschuch (2021) prompts us to consider suitable vocabulary for analysing ‘post’ situations. In this commentary, I pursue the notion that the ‘post’ discourse already has a specific vocabulary. Taking Houssay-Holzschuch’s lead and drawing from Massey’s conception of space-time regimes, I argue that ‘post’ is used powerfully to fasten the past to a place’s present, bounding certain geopolitical discourses to people and places and overshadowing experiential memories of place. This powerful lexicographic move is shrouded by cruelly optimistic rhetoric that otherwise links ‘post’ with newly opened spaces of possibility, positive change, and hope.