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You Can't Go to War Without Song
You Can't Go to War without Song explores the role of public performance in political activism in contemporary South Africa. Weaving together detailed ethnographic fieldwork and an astute theoretical framework, Omotayo Jolaosho examines the cohesive power of protest songs and dances within the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), one of many social movements that emerged in the wake of South Africa's democratic transition after 1994. Jolaosho demonstrates the ways APF members adapted anti-apartheid songs and dance to create new expressive forms that informed and commented on their struggles for access to water, electricity, housing, education, and health facilities, the costs of which had been ma...
Ethnographies of Power
Working with key concepts from theorist and human geographer Gillian Hart, this book argues for an ethnographic and geographic approach to critically engage contemporary political-economic processes in the context of real world struggles.
A Turbulent South Africa
Highlights the continuing social unrest and public protest occurring in South Africa’s poorest districts. Frequently praised for its democratic transition, South Africa has experienced an almost uninterrupted cycle of social protest since the late 1990s. There have been increasing numbers of demonstrations against the often appalling living conditions of millions of South Africans, pointing to the fact that they have yet to achieve full citizenship. A Turbulent South Africa offers a new look at this historic period in the existence of the young South African democracy, far removed from the idealistic portrait of the “Rainbow Nation.” Jérôme Tournadre draws on interviews and observati...
Tell Our Story
Focusing on three South African communities the authors dismiss the idea that some groups are voiceless, arguing that they are being deliberately ignored by dominant news media The dominant news media are often accused of reflecting an ‘elite bias’, privileging and foregrounding the interests of a small segment of society while ignoring the narratives of the majority. The authors of Tell Our Story investigate this problem and offer a hands-on demonstration of listening journalism and research in practice. In the process they dismiss the idea that some groups are voiceless, arguing that what is often described in such terms is mostly a matter of those groups being deliberately ignored. Fo...
The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism
This book documents the emergence and development of the theory of racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa. It interrogates the specificity of this theory in the South African context and draws lessons for its global applicability. Racism and capitalism have a long history of entanglement. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Africa, where colonial and apartheid regimes used explicit systems of racial hierarchy to shore up profit. It is therefore no surprise that South Africa has represented a key site for thinking about the role that racism plays in shaping state policy, labor markets, patterns of capital accumulation, and working-class struggle. Illuminating these dynamics, this ...
Democracy's Infrastructure
In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political form...
Electric Capitalism
Although Africa is the most under-supplied region of the world for electricity, its economies are utterly dependent on it. There are enormous inequalities in electricity access, with industry receiving abundant supplies of cheap power while more than 80 per cent of the continent's population remain off the power grid. Africa is not unique in this respect, but levels of inequality are particularly pronounced here due to the inherent unevenness of 'electric capitalism' on the continent. This book provides an innovative theoretical framework for understanding electricity and capitalism in Africa, followed by a series of case studies that examine different aspects of electricity supply and consu...
South Africa's Insurgent Citizens
Twenty years on from South Africa's first democratic election, the post-apartheid political order is more fractured, and more fractious, than ever before. Police violence seems the order of the day – whether in response to a protest in Ficksburg or a public meeting outside a mine in Marikana. For many, this has signalled the end of the South African dream. Politics, they declare, is the preserve of the corrupt, the self-interested, the incompetent and the violent. They are wrong. Julian Brown argues that a new kind of politics can be seen on the streets and in the courtrooms of the country. This politics is made by a new kind of citizen – one that is neither respectful nor passive, but instead insurgent. The collapse of the dream of a consensus politics is not a cause for despair. South Africa's political order is fractured, and in its cracks new forms of activity, new leaders and new movements are emerging.
The Subversive Seventies
"Progressive and revolutionary movements of the 70s, which took place across the globe, provide an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action, even more than those of the 60s. The 60s were a crucial historical turning point and we can certainly learn from those movements, both the victorious and the vanquished, but, fundamentally, they marked the end of an era. The 1970s, in contrast, herald the beginning of our time. In response to the insurgencies of the 60s, new structures of power, many of which are now grouped under the name neoliberalism, were tested and institutionalized, and are essentially the same ones that rule over us today. The progressive and revolutionary struggles of the 70s, then, constituted an initial set of experiments for confronting our current conjuncture, a first test of the terrain. Feminist and gay liberation movements, worker and anticolonial struggles, antinuclear and antiracist projects, along with many others liberation efforts developed in the 70s offer us not only initial analyses of today's structures of economic and political domination, but also forms of critique and resistance most effective against them"--
