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As a young boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Robins was haunted by an old postcard-size photograph of three unknown women on a table in the dining room. Only later did he learn that the women were his father’s mother and sisters, photographed in Berlin in 1937, before they were killed in the Holocaust. Steven’s father, who had fled Nazi Germany before it was too late, never spoke about the fate of his family who remained there. Steven became obsessed with finding out what happened to the women, but had little to go on. In time he stumbled on official facts in museums in Washington DC and Berlin, and later he discovered over a hundred letters sent to his fath...
New South African Keywords sets out to do two things. The first is to provide a guide to the key words and key concepts that have come to shape public and political thought and debate in South Africa since 1994. The second purpose is to provide a compendium of cutting-edge thinking on the new society. The result is a concise and insightful guide to postapartheid South Africa, which should be useful to students, citizens, tourists, business managers, decision makers--in fact, to anyone wanting to make sense of South African society today.
The post-apartheid public sphere in South Africa has been characterised by race tensions and distrust. Socio-economic inequalities and structural unemployment are contributing to widespread crises. In addressing the conceptual and empirical questions relating to the transition to democracy, the contributors to this volume take the questions of culture and identity seriously, drawing attention to the creative agency of citizens of the 'new' South Africa. They raise important questions concerning the limits of citizenship and procedural democracy. Steven L. Robins is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Stellenbosch North America: Ohio U PressBR>
There is a surprising resurgence of traditional authority, custom and culture in post-apartheid South Africa, as part of a conscious African renaissance. Yet customary law studies highlight the artificial origins of these 'traditional' institutions. This book poses three questions: what is the relation between the changing legal and socio-political position of traditional authority and customary law in the new South Africa? Why are they changing in this way? and, what does this teach us about the interrelation between laws, politics and culture in the post-modern world? BARBARA OOMEN is Assistant Professor of Law & Development in the University of Amsterdam North America: Palgrave; South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Introduction : Democracy's anxious returns / David Kyuman Kim and John L. Jackson, Jr. - "Look, baby, we got Jesus on our flag" : robust democracy and religious debate from the era of slavery to the age of Obama / Edward J. Blum -- Forerunner : the campaigns and career of Edward Brooke / Jason Sokol -- Iran's French Revolution : religion, philosophy, and crowds / Roxanne Varzi - Democracy's new song : Black reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 and the melodramatic imagination / Marina Bilbija - Habits of the heart : youth religious participation as progress, peril, or change? / Monica R. Miller and Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman - Populism and late liberalism : a special affinity? / Jean Comaroff -- Chadors, feminists, terror : the racial politics of U.S. media representations of the 1979 Iranian women's movement / Sylvia Chan-Malik -- The end of neoliberalism : what is left of the left / John Comaroff - Religion as race, recognition as democracy : Lemba "Black Jews" in South Africa / Noah Tamarkin - The race toward caraqueño citizenship : negotiating race, class, and participatory democracy / Giles Harrison-Conwill - The racialization of Islam in American law / Neil Gotanda
Conclusion: Consequences -- Bibliography -- Index
Critics of liberalism in Europe and North America argue that a stress on 'rights talk' and identity politics has led to fragmentation, individualisation and depoliticisation. But are these developments really signs of 'the end of politics'? In the post-colonial, post-apartheid, neo-liberal new South Africa poor and marginalised citizens continue to struggle for land, housing and health care. They must respond to uncertainty and radical contingencies on a daily basis. This requires multiple strategies, an engaged, practised citizenship, one that links the daily struggle to well organised mobilisation around claiming rights. Robins argues for the continued importance of NGOs, social movements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy. He goes beyond the sanitised prescriptions of 'good governance' so often touted by development agencies. Instead he argues for a complex, hybrid and ambiguous relationship between civil society and the state, where new negotiations around citizenship emerge. Steven L. Robins is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Stellenbosch and editor of Limits to Liberation after Apartheid (James Currey).
The authors of this volume address multiple questions involving the nature of youth protest in the twenty-first century. Through their use of a case study approach, they comment upon the ways in which youth protest has been influenced by the electronic and social media and evaluate the effectiveness of protest activities, many of which were framed in reaction to neo-liberalism and state authoritarianism. A number of the authors further comment upon the utility of employing social movement theory to analyze the nature and character of protest actions, while others situate such events within specific political, social and cultural contexts. The case studies focus upon protest activities in Bahrain, Turkey, Iran, Cambodia, South Africa, China, Russia, Chile, Spain, and the U.S., and together, they offer a comparative analysis of an important global phenomenon. In so doing, the authors further address issues involving the changing nature of globalized protest participation, its immediate and long-term consequences, and the ways in which protests have encouraged a re-evaluation of the nature of inequality, as constructed within educational, social, and political spheres.
Global Flows, Local Appropriations; Facets of Secularisation and Re-Islamization Among Contemporary Cape Muslims is the first ethnographic study of muslims in Cape Town, South Africa at this level in 25 years. It explores processes of secularisation and re-islamization among Cape Muslims in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa in which liberal and secular values have attained considerable purchase in the new political and social elites. Fractured by status, ethnicity and religious orientation, Cape muslims have responded to these changes through an ambiguous accomodation with the new order. This study explores this development through chapters on conversions to Islam among black Africans in Cape Town, Cape women's experiences with polygyny, Cape muslims and HIV/AIDS, the status of Islam in a prison Cape Town in the post-apartheid era and on contestation over rituals among Cape muslims.
"This book explains why nearly 30 years after the transition to democracy, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupiers as threats to the government's housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as "disorderly" threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do gove...