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South Africa, Settler Colonialism and the Failures of Liberal Democracy
In South Africa, two unmistakable features describe post-Apartheid politics. The first is the formal framework of liberal democracy, including regular elections, multiple political parties and a range of progressive social rights. The second is the politics of the ‘extraordinary’, which includes a political discourse that relies on threats and the use of violence, the crude re-racialization of numerous conflicts, and protests over various popular grievances. In this highly original work, Thiven Reddy shows how conventional approaches to understanding democratization have failed to capture the complexities of South Africa’s post-Apartheid transition. Rather, as a product of imperial expansion, the South African state, capitalism and citizen identities have been uniquely shaped by a particular mode of domination, namely settler colonialism. South Africa, Settler Colonialism and the Failures of Liberal Democracy is an important work that sheds light on the nature of modernity, democracy and the complex politics of contemporary South Africa.
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.
Imperial Debris
Imperial Debris redirects critical focus from ruins as evidence of the past to "ruination" as the processes through which imperial power occupies the present. Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people's bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envisio...
Democracy Compromised
This book argues that the promulgation of the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework and Communal Land Rights Acts runs the risk of compromising South Africa's democracy. The acts establish traditional councils with land administration powers. These structures are dominated by unelected members.
Private Security in Africa
Across Africa, growing economic inequality, instability and urbanization have led to the rapid spread of private security providers. While these PSPs have already had a significant impact on African societies, their impact has so far received little in the way of comprehensive analysis. Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, and encompassing anthropology, sociology and political science, Private Security in Africa offers unique insight into the lives and experiences of security providers and those affected by them, as well as into the fragile state context which has allowed them to thrive. Featuring original empirical research and case studies ranging from private policing in South Africa to the recruitment of Sierra Leoneans for private security work in Iraq, the book considers the full implications of PSPs for security and the state, not only for Africa but for the world as a whole.
Hegemony and Resistance
This title was first published in 2000: An original explanation for the importance South Africans attachment to ethnic and racial group categories in everyday speech and practice. The answers emerge by presenting a history of dominant and resistance discourses as they relate to collective identity - a move which breaks with prevailing approaches to South African political history, problematises ethnic group categories and offers new ways of seeing old debates.
Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa
This book explores the relationship between race and class among middle-class Christians in South Africa. The book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich study of middle-class Christians in contemporary South Africa, as they seek to live good lives and build a good society. Focused on the city of Cape Town, drawing upon ethnographic research in conservative and progressive multiracial Protestant churches, furnished with critical analysis of South African literature and popular culture, this timely study explores expressions of ambition and anxiety that are both spiritual and material. Building upon debates over middle-class identity and morality from sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, this book analyses congregational attempts at social unity through worship music and creative youth ministry, discussions on white privilege and shame, and the impact of middle-class black activism in South African churches and society. This book will be of interest to researchers of South African culture and society, religion, anthropology, and sociology.
Debating African Philosophy
In African countries there has been a surge of intellectual interest in foregrounding ideas and thinkers of African origin—in philosophy as in other disciplines—that have been unjustly ignored or marginalized. African scholars have demonstrated that precolonial African cultures generated ideas and arguments which were at once truly philosophical and distinctively African, and several contemporary African thinkers are now established figures in the philosophical mainstream. Yet, despite the universality of its themes, relevant contributions from African philosophy have rarely permeated global philosophical debates. Critical intellectual excavation has also tended to prioritize precolonial...
Africa's World Trade
Are Africa's world markets really contributing to development across the continent for individuals, nations and regions? This is the key question posed by Margaret Lee in this provocative book, in which she argues that all too often the voices of African traders are obscured amid a blizzard of statistical analysis. However, it is these very voices - from those operating on the ground as formal or informal traders - that must be listened to in order to form a true understanding of the impact trade regimes have on these individuals and their communities. Featuring a wealth of oral histories from across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, including Africans in China, Africa's World Trade offers a unique insight into how the complexity of international trade agreements can shape the everyday lives of ordinary Africans.
Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa
This is the third volume in a trilogy on identity, memory and subjectivity. Contributors to the book share an ambition to combine personal, political and existential dimensions in detailed evocations of the ambitions and vulnerabilities of contemporary Africans. Their essays aim to forge alliances between patient local scholarship and adventurous theoretical speculation that should inspire new research and caution against bland generalizations about African marginality.
