Open letter to the London Review of Books

Posted by Professor Achille Mbembe
19th July 2010

To the Editor,
With its stress on its own 'depth and scholarship and good writing' and its 'unmatched international reputation', the LRB has a responsibility to maintain high standards if it is to retain its enviable position of having the 'largest circulation of any literary magazine in Europe'.

We find it baffling therefore that you continue to publish work by RW Johnson that, in our opinion, is often stacked with the superficial and the racist. In a particularly egregious recent post on the LRB blog, 'After the World Cup', 6 July 2010, Johnson, astonishingly, makes a comparison between African migrants and invading baboons. He follows this with another between 'local black shopkeepers' and rottweilers. He concludes with what he presumably thinks is a joke about throwing bananas to the baboons.

Whilst it might be unfair to pick on a man for his inability to be funny, we believe that it would be wholly wrong to stay silent when he resorts to peddling highly offensive, age-old racist stereotypes that the LRB editorial team deems fit to publish. (Indeed, we note from the comments that at some point the post was edited – and yet, in our opinion, it still remains an appalling and racist piece of writing.)

In the particular arena of football, some fans do not need to be encouraged to produce racist abuse. Across Europe for many years, black players have been spat at, subjected to racist chants often including references to monkeys or apes, and have been the focus of monkey chanting noises during matches. Neo-Nazi groups have also been known to use football matches as target areas for recruiting new members and promoting their racist practice. (How ironic that when Johnson does decide to write about ‘Football and Fascism’, 11 July 2010, he produces a piece about Italy that reveals the dearth of his knowledge.)

While South Africa has made great strides, overturning the racist politics of the National Party, it still has a long way to go in combating the racism that thrives among certain communities and individuals. Elsewhere, in the UK for example, this is no time for complacency about attitudes to race. Although British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, may have been humiliated at the recent General Elections, his party now has two MEPs. Let’s not forget that young black men in this country are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than young white men, and they comprise a disproportionate number of the prison population.

We are deeply concerned that the LRB could be so impressed by RW Johnson that his racist and reactionary opinion continues to be published in the magazine and now, in the blog too. And there we all were thinking the LRB was progressive.

Yours sincerely,
Diran Adebayo, writer & academic, Lancaster University
Patience Agbabi, poet
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist & writer
Candace Allen, writer, journalist & broadcaster
Cristel Amiss, coordinator, Black Women’s Rape Action Project
Baffour Ankomah, editor, New African
Nana Ayebia Clarke, publisher, Ayebia
Pete Ayrton, publisher, Serpent’s Tail
Sharmilla Beezmohun, deputy editor, Wasafiri
Benedict Birnberg
Professor Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford
Professor Patrick Bond, University of Kwazulu-Natal
Victoria Brittain, writer & journalist
Dr Margaret Busby OBE, publisher & writer
Teju Cole, writer
Eleanor Crook, sculptor & academic, University of the Arts
Fred D’Aguiar, writer
Dr David Dibosa, academic
Kodwo Eshun, The Otolith Group
Gareth Evans, writer, editor, curator
Katy Evans-Bush, poet
Bernardine Evaristo MBE, writer
Nuruddin Farah, writer
Professor Maureen Freely, writer & academic, University of Warwick
Kadija George, publisher, Sable LitMag
Professor Paul Gilroy, London School of Economics
Professor Peter Hallward, Kingston University London
M John Harrison, writer
Stewart Home, writer
Michael Horovitz, poet
Professor Aamer Hussein, writer & academic, University of Southampton
Professor John Hutnyk, Goldsmiths
Dr Sean Jacobs, The New School
Selma James, coordinator, Global Women’s Strike
Gus John, associate professor, Institute of Education, University of London
Anthony Joseph, poet & novelist
Kwame Kwei-Armah, playwright & broadcaster
Candida Lacey, publisher, Myriad Editions
Alexis Lykiard, writer
Firoze Manji, editor in chief, Pambazuka News
Shula Marks, emeritus professor, School of Oriental & African Studies
Professor Achille Mbembe, University of the Witwatersrand & Duke University
Dr China Miéville, writer & academic,
Professor David Morley, University of Warwick
Professor Susheila Nasta, editor, Wasafiri
Courttia Newland, writer
Dr Alastair Niven OBE, principal, Cumberland Lodge
Dr Zoe Norridge, University of Oxford
Dr Deirdre Osborne, Goldsmiths
Lara Pawson, journalist & writer
Pascale Petit, poet
Caryl Phillips, writer
Dr Nina Power, Roehampton University
Jeremy Poynting, managing editor, Peepal Tree Press
Gary Pulsifer, publisher, Arcadia Books
Michael Rosen, poet
Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group
Richard Seymour, writer & activist
Dr George Shire, reviews editor, Soundings
Professor David Simon, Royal Holloway
Keith Somerville, Brunel University
Colin Stoneman, editorial coordinator, Journal of Southern African Studies
George Szirtes, poet & translator
Dr Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths
Professor Megan Vaughan, University of Cambridge
Patrick Vernon, chief executive, The Afiya Trust
Professor Dennis Walder, Open University
Verna Wilkins, writer & publisher, Tamarind Books
Dr Patrick Wilmot, writer & journalist
Adele Winston
Professor Brian Winston, University of Lincoln
Dr Leo Zeilig, University of the Witwatersrand
PLEASE NOTE: Institutions are named for identification purposes only

Nationalism, a Janus-faced animal: the potential for xenophobia

These have been heady times as millions of South Africans celebrate the successful hosting of the World Cup. Being the first African country to host this global event does indeed seem worthy of celebrating. This extremely costly event has produced an extraordinary sense of global citizenship and national pride and belonging. Yet, not all observers are optimistic and euphoric. Dale McKinley (Cape Times 14th June 2010) and Patrick Bond are amongst some of the many critics who have questioned FIFA's claims about the economic and developmental benefits of hosting the event. In fact, Bond claims that FIFA has taken out of South Africa an estimated R25 billion in tax-free profits without leaving nearly as much in terms of financial benefits for the host nation (Cape Times 5th July, 2010).

Detractors, who bemoan the massive costs of hosting this event, claim that these resources could have been put to far better use by building houses and establishing other more appropriate development projects. Yet millions of South African patriots passionately wish for the feel-good fraternity and festivity of the soccer carnival to continue. They do not wish to be burdened by mundane realities of crime, corruption, violence, xenophobia and labour strikes that have periodically penetrated FIFA's well fortified football bubble. Even Left critics such as Richard Pithouse acknowledge the extraordinary social levelling power and utopian effects this global sporting event has generated. As he puts it, 'in a world where inequality is so profound and so effectively policed, administered and legitimated there is something utopian in the moments of transcendence that football can create' (Cape Times, 5th July, 2010).

Events such as the FIFA World Cup can indeed be seen as ritualised utopian spaces in which spectacle is cordoned off from the mundane realities of everyday life. Like the temporary suspension of everyday conventions and social practices during carnivals and rites, the month long World Cup in South Africa has resulted in the suspension of business as usual.

I too experienced this carnival-like atmosphere and camaraderie at the World Cup matches I attended in Cape Town. Although I encountered passionate competition between supporters of different nations at World Cup games, this rivalry was generally accompanied by the recognition of common humanity and mutual respect.

For me this 'feel good' bubble was punctured when I was recently asked to give a talk on the photographs and poems by David Lurie and Patricia Schonstein on display at the Right to Refuge exhibition at Cape Town Holocaust Centre. The photographs and poems focus on victims of the xenophobic violence that erupted in South African cities in May 2008. This exceptionally powerful collection of images and poetry hints at something quite unsettling about unrestrained outbursts of nationalist fervour of the sort that we witnessed in soccer stadiums throughout South Africa. This sense of foreboding was heightened by having the Holocaust Centre as the exhibition venue.

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the shadow side of nationalism and the nation state. They draw explicit attention to the political violence associated with the foundation of nation-states. For instance, Ranjana Khanna has drawn attention to the mass expulsions of an estimated 16 million people that occurred following the 1947 Partition when India was split into India and west and east Pakistan. These historical events demonstrate that the creation and celebration of nationalism and the formation of the nation-state are often accompanied by processes of xenophobic violence that result in displaced refugees becoming stateless and vulnerable.

Jewish scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler have written critically about how the formation of the State of Israel was one such moment, and the continuing suffering of Palestianian refugees is a tragic consequence and continuing legacy of this founding moment. Arendt noted that the 'solution to the Jewish question' in the aftermath of the Shoah 'merely reproduced a new category of refugees, the [Palestinians], thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people'. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) also draws attention to the massive violent displacement of indigenous Palestinians during the 'War of Independence' or 'Nakba.' While Jewish supporters of the State of Israel continue to struggle to acknowledge this grim reality, Palestinians have indeed become stateless refugees and what the late Edward Said referred to as 'the victims of the victims.'

The founding of the State of Israel is by no means the only example of such violent processes of expulsion. Moreover, even when nation-states are well established, the nationalist desires and ambitions of leaders and citizens, especially those citizens experiencing chronic poverty and marginalization, can be expressed through the expulsion of internal 'enemy populations' that are transformed into non-nationals and stateless peoples. Idi Amin's expulsion of the Asian population in Uganda is but one of numerous such examples on the African continent and beyond. The genocidal violence against Jews in Nazi Germany is certainly a limit case when it comes to these nation-state processes.

In her 1951 study of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt referred to the ways in which xenophobic nationalist responses to those displaced and stateless in the period between the two world wars contributed towards the pathologising and criminalising of refugees and non-nationals. Reflecting on the devastating consequences of statelessness for Jews and other displaced peoples, Arendt concluded that human rights depended on national rights, that is, rights that constitute and protect one as a citizen of a nation-state. Without national rights, she argued, talk about human rights was simply 'hopeless idealism'.

At first glance this dire warning from Arendt seems wholly inappropriate for the South African context. After all, South Africa has a democratic constitution and a responsible state that is certainly not bent on the violent expulsion of foreigners. Yet, Arendt's observations do seem to have resonance for us today. Could it be that the ways in which refugees and non-nationals are treated in their daily interactions with police and other state functionaries share some resemblances with the processes described by Arendt? Let me illustrate this by means of anecdotal evidence.

Over the past few years I have come to know a group of over a dozen young Zimbabwean men who sell crafts, and more recently national flags, close to where I reside in Newlands, Cape Town. These young men seek to make a living to support themselves and their families in Zimbabwe. When the xenophobic violence erupted in May 2008, fearing violence from neighbours, these men fled the communities in which they lived in Cape Town's poorer working class suburbs. Most of them lost their possessions, including the tools and materials that they needed to make 'tourist paintings' of the townships and Table Mountain which they sold to make a living.

Forced to seek refuge from the violence by sleeping in Newlands Forest completely exposed to the bitterly cold Cape winter, they managed to find temporary shelter in churches and community centres. Notwithstanding these setbacks, in a remarkably short period they had managed to get their arts and crafts enterprise up and running. Since they continued to be harassed by Metro Police and SAPS, I attempted to intervene on their behalf by writing letters and speaking to the local Counsellor and the Station Commander at the Claremont Police Station. I explained that these young men were responsible breadwinners who, under extremely harsh and precarious conditions, sought to support their families back in Zimbabwe. Although it seemed police harassment had significantly subsided, a few weeks ago I received a call from the brother of one of the men who had been arrested by the police. After having the spent the night in jail, the young man was released, having paid a R50 admission of guilt fine for 'disturbing the peace'.

It turned out that a Newlands resident regularly calls the police complaining about the noise from the dozen vendors selling fruit, flowers, newspapers, the Big Issue, and crafts next to his house. Yet it is the Zimbabweans who are routinely arrested. How is it possible that the resident and the police know exactly who amongst these vendors is responsible for 'disturbing the peace'. Clearly, the South African sellers have employers who will complain loudly if their employees are fined, arrested or have their goods confiscated. The Zimbabweans, by contrast, are soft targets for police who feel obliged to make an arrest to mollify irate Newlands residents who complain about noise.

This brief anecdote draws attention to the complicity of ordinary citizens and state functionaries in rendering non-nationals vulnerable to criminalisation and discrimination. Once criminalised, these non-nationals are rendered increasingly susceptible to violence from South African men who are unemployed and who may resent what they perceive to be 'illegal' economic competition from foreigners. So, while Zimbabweans sell South African flags to patriotic football fans, they are acutely aware that the benign nationalistic spirit of the soccer festivities could quite easily morph into resentment and violence against foreigners once the FIFA carnival closes shop.

Nationalism is indeed a Janus-faced animal: during the struggle for national liberation it helped forge solidarity in the fight against a repressive apartheid state; yet, after apartheid it has demonstrated its potential to become a far more menacing and ambiguous beast. Unless citizens, civil society and the state begin to respond constructively to the rumours, threats and everyday violence directed against non-nationals, the benign rainbow nationalism and expressions of global citizenship of the World Cup celebrations could tragically morph into the kind of lethal violence that has been historically associated by Hannah Arendt with conditions of statelessness. The photographs and poems at the Right to Refuge exhibition at the Holocaust Centre provide a poignant reminder of how exclusivist versions of national belonging can so easily end up dehumanising and discriminating against others.

By Steven Robbins.

Robins is professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch

This article was first published in the Cape Times, Monday 12 July, 2010.

South Africa as a contemporary frontier society

Beyond the common knowledge of South Africa’s violent history and the anti-apartheid struggle, one of my first intimate encounters with South Africa was my reading of J.J. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians a few years ago. The image of this dusty frontier town stranded at the edge of nowhere and left to fend for itself in the dying days of the Empire against an imaginary barbarian army moving ever closer has stayed with me, as an especially eloquent account of the human capacity to distort reality in order to frame it within one’s own world view. For the reader quickly comes to understand that the feared Barbarians where never coming and that it is, au contraire, the settlers who kept going beyond the boundaries of their frontier town, provoking encounters with the Other that took place almost exclusively on Barbarian land. Despite this fact, the fear of an imminent invasion ends up plunging the town in a sort of collective hysteria and the town ends up collapsing in on itself, self-destructing through the symbolic torture of the Magistrate, the main character in the novel.

An important detail to point out, the Magistrate’s downfall begins with an intimate relationship with a Barbarian girl and his decision to take her back to her people after attempting to heal the wounds inflicted on her by his compatriots. Herein lies a perfect representation of an intrigue that keeps playing out again and again in the Western imagination. By showing the girl a grain of humanity, the magistrate is somehow corrupted and ends up being treated like a barbarian himself. What is especially perverse about this relationship is how it is framed through a bestowing of generosity, sympathy and humanity by the magistrate on the girl. Through this relationship, the constant pushing of the frontier town’s boundaries into Barbarian land, the continual transgression and invasion of this land, is portrayed as a humanitarian mission, a good deed. The settler crosses into Barbarian land, not to colonize the Barbarians, invade their land or violate their women, but to save one of their own and return her to her people, even though she is returned blinded and maimed.

So what does this story tell us about the concept of the frontier? I think the operating word here is limit. Being at the frontier implies being on the precipice, on the edge. The colony is the last frontier of civilization and a place where settlers live at the limits of their own humanity. The lands beyond settler towns are mythical, magical, apocalyptical places where civilized human beings encounter spirits, barbarians and the ever-present potentiality of death. Every step beyond the boundaries of the frontier town implies either the risk of death, or even worse, contamination.

I think the notion of limit, being at the limits, might be a productive way of using the concept of the frontier for thinking about contemporary South Africa. When I visited Johannesburg for the first time last year, I was overwhelmed with this visceral feeling of being constantly at the precipice of something big, an Event, of walking a fine line between risk and potentiality, absolute demise and an utopian future. This is especially paradoxical as many would argue convincingly that South Africans are living through a post-Event period and not the contrary, that is, the period after apartheid. And yet that feeling of being at the limits of something remains quite persistent. It reveals itself in the sense of anxiety that permeates through daily life, anxiety about arbitrary death at the hands of a mugger, anxiety about xenophobia rearing its ugly head once more, anxiety about falling into patterns of auto-destruction that have beleaguered other African countries. That anxiety, however, is constantly tempered by a deep sense of hope, pride, and optimism in the future that feeds on the fact that South Africa, despite having every reason to collapse in on itself, to destroy itself, has somehow managed to hold itself together and that it continues to work through the mess and ruins of its history without descending into the abyss. And so symbolically, by constantly swinging between imminent death and renaissance, by continuing to struggle with its demons, real and imagined, as it simultaneously moves forward, pushing the boundary of the precipice a few feet in front of it, just far enough not to fall over the edge, but close enough to look down below and be faced with the abyss, South Africa is very much a frontier society. It is a site where the frontier of humanity is constantly negotiated and renegotiated, for it is where an atrocity took place and managed to settle in long enough to create its own perverse logic, and where another atrocity was somehow avoided, as liberation from apartheid took the unlikely, ambiguous, but nevertheless deeply ethical path of reconciliation.

In a contemporary context, where the notion of the frontier has been replaced with the much more rigid and limited notion of the border, or diluted into a depoliticized notion of borderlessness and cosmopolitanism, I think it might be useful to reinvent the concept of the frontier as a site where human potentiality is simultaneously realized and circumcised. The frontier is not a no man’s land, nor is it a neutral space for well-intended, moderated dialogue. The frontier is characterized by a landscape of extremes, where survival remains an open question and where anxiety and fear are potent motivators for inventiveness as well as apocalyptic impulses. A frontier society in contemporary times is a site where necropolitics and the politics of hope meet, where a utopian vision for the future is constantly undercut by the remains and stigmatas of the past. It is an environment of extremes where individuals and groups are confronted with the risks and possibilities of being at the limits of their own habitus, histories, ethics, and at the limits of the racial, economical, cultural, political configurations that have served as their points of reference.

One can argue that the concept of the frontier is more relevant than ever, as colonial metropolises are slowly turning into frontier societies. Europe and North America are enveloping themselves in discourses of fear and anxiety about the inevitable arrival of barbarians from their former colonies just as they begin to be faced with the true implications of their discourses on universal human rights and their humanitarian interventions.

As a country that has been faced with these fundamental questions and lived through their consequences, South Africa can be an especially rich site for exploring the potentiality and limits of the concept of the frontier today. If we draw on the South African experience, the frontier might be a stimulating concept to think and imagine a radical humanism as it pushes us to face the limits of humanity and inhumanity, and examine the various forms each might take in contemporary societies.

Yara El-Ghadban
Université de Montréal

Sawyer seminar - institutionalizing and internalizing divisions

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, beginning its reading group with a series on Old and New Racial Formations. Over the next months, participants will reflect on the readings and discussions on race. This posting is by Christina Cielo, a doctoral fellow with the JWTC.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

Institutionalizing and Internalizing Divisions: Miscegenation, Segregation and De-Segregation

The conversation in the Sawyer Seminar Series on segregation emerged from a set of readings that highlighted historically institutionalized processes of race-making in South Africa. But an abiding concern in the readings and in the discussion was also the inability of racial categories to contain biological, social and economic phenomena.

This was evident in an extraordinary study we read on the early 20^th century production of the tuberculosis epidemic in the black South African population. In White Plague, Black Labor, Randall Packard gathers a wealth of data to show that the extent of the tuberculosis epidemic among black South Africans was related to the ways that their labor was exploited. Government policies directed by the economic interests of first mining, then urban industrialization, dictated blacks' spatial mobility, which in turn exacerbated their collective vulnerability to the disease.

Participants in the seminar linked this historical study to the current AIDS epidemic in South Africa. This idea sparked further remarks on the entanglements of contagion and fear, intimacy and race. Discussions of race relations often invoke its association with economic and social or symbolic power. But we need to look beyond power as domination and begin to try to understand the complex intertwining of affect and power. Urban white residents were uncomfortably close to the tuberculosis epidemic among migrant laboring Africans, and used it to justify segregation policies in the early 20^th century. If urban segregation was the fearful response to the contagion of “white plague” in that period, to what extent is the economic segregation of private and public health care systems a fearful response to health risks today?

But the story, as ever, is more complicated. It is not just that fear and power drive segregation and its consequent inequalities. There is always the excess of affect that mires such a direct cause-effect relation. Emotions and identifications do not fit neatly into categories that are authoritatively imposed. In the 20^th century consolidation of South Africa as a white nation, it was precisely the cleavages among whites as a group that shaped particular segregation policies. The 1913 Native Land Act that created black reserves kept rural whites and blacks from becoming too familiar or equal. If that were tolerated, as a proponent of the bill said, “they would soon find that they would be a bastard nation” (in Gilliomee, p.309). And such a nation would do little to sustain the driving economic force of industrialization that depended on categorical divisions of laborers. In the interest of capital, racial and class categories were adjusted hand in hand. One seminar participant asked, “Can you even put in place a structure of segregation without calibrating class categories as well?”

Early segregation policies were also shaped by an acknowledgement of the ways that identity is affectively grounded in particular places. The 1923 Native Urban Areas Act, passed on the heels of an influenza epidemic in Cape Town, restricted where blacks could live in cities. It attempted to prevent blacks from internalizing an identification with the industrializing cities which nevertheless needed their labor. Blacks' sense of belonging to the cities would be tantamount to a first step in making it theirs. As the prime minister of the Cape said, Africans should “go back to the place whence they came – to the native territories, where they should really make their home” (in Gilliomee, p.292). Yet the relatively small tracts of land reserved for what were eventually called “homelands” were wholly inadequate to sustain the majority black population. Since 1918, African homelands sustained less than a third of their inhabitants. By 1976, the proportion of homeland families' income from urban areas was over 70% (Gilliomee and Schlemmer, p.7).

The legitimizing narrative of segregation shifted throughout the 20^th century. By the 1960s, homelands were defined as separate nations, with their own authorities and citizenry. Yet this was in no way a threat to the white nation that South Africa was forging: “After all, what nation state can be held responsible for the educational expenditure or the unemployment, old-age and other welfare benefits needed in another sovereign land?” (Wilson, p.61). South Africa's process of capital accumulation in the first part of the 20^th century assured that investment took place not in these separate Bantustans, but in the cities that legislation prevented becoming black South Africans' “homes.” The result was a dependence that deprived the homelands of economic, social and symbolic power, forestalling any real political or economic sovereignty.

The parallels with contemporary international relations are striking. A colleague Marcel Paret is working on research that compares black migrant labor policies through apartheid in South Africa with current U.S. migration policies. Arizona, one of the four U.S. states that border Mexico, recently passed a bill that makes it a crime to fail to carry immigration documents and gives police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Marcel pointed out that this state bill controls Latinos and Mexican migrants in the United States just as the pass system controlled black labor in apartheid South Africa. In each case, the creation of a class of potential criminals presumes and constructs race.

Segregation depends on borders and fences. The sheer preponderance of physical boundaries in South Africa has come up repeatedly in the seminar. There was the bitter almond hedge built in 1660 in the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch to keep their settlers apart from the vast land that stretched up and beyond their ken. We ruminated on the mythic and material importance of the frontier in previous seminars. And now in Johannesburg, there are high walls and fences, many electric and alarmed, around homes to keep their residents safe. Perhaps, as a seminar participant commented, we need to better understand the conditions that make for constant fence-building. One thing that has become clear is our discussion is that fences, here and elsewhere, depend on and produce processes of racialization.

Yet post-apartheid, post-multiculturalism, distinctions and divisions do not map onto race quite so neatly. There is now an emerging black elite in South Africa. Differences are now incorporated into unequal systems, rather than used as the basis for explicit exclusions. Claims for the universality of citizen and human rights have also meant that the equality of human work can lead to its objectification as a commodity. As Simone Weil intimated some 60 years ago, there is indeed a profound link between human rights conceived as goods (i.e. the right to water, the right to health, etc.) and a market-based development model. Thus it is no surprise that universalization of “participation” throughout the developing world in the last decades has not transformed structures of inequalities. In Bolivia, for example, the Law of Popular Participation extended access to the state by incorporating local differences into decision-making mechanisms. So the customary authority, for example, is also the community's representative within the municipality. But critics note that this recognition and integration of cultural distinctions has also allowed difference to be “managed within a general economy of domination” (Crespo and Fernandez, p.37).

Still, the continued insistence on institutional respect for local and ethnic distinctions is a fundamental part of indigenous social movements worldwide. Last year, the Republic of Bolivia officially became the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Its new constitution defends not only representative and participatory democracy, but communal democracy as well, in an attempt to negotiate between positive and customary rights frameworks. In this context, and with a government brought to power by indigenous social movements, how are Bolivian state institutions and national legislation conceiving and racializing difference?

To answer that question is far beyond the scope of this blog entry. But I wonder if attempts to make and institutionalize distinctions and separations are unavoidable. After all, we need conceptual fences. It is our ability to distinguish differences, to define patterns and categories that help us make sense of and act on our world. But when do collective demarcations and borders become debilitating? When do definitions of who we are, and who others are, divide and blind and oppress us?

Following the ideas raised in the seminar, perhaps it may help us to take seriously the facts of excess and affect. Institutions and legislation not only produce results but also people with unexpected and radically different ways of seeing and experiencing and connecting to the world. The ways that we conceive of the institution of property, for example, would have to consider factors beyond market exchange values and even Marxist use values. Property and space, rather, are vital to a sense of belonging and becoming. Power and race relations are thus not only about segregation and domination, but also about the impossibility of the closure of racialized domination. This may help us understand the haphazardness and contingency of the historical processes of race-making. With this in mind, we can also more clearly see what today's divisions and categorizations, miscegenations and de-segregations, do for us and why. And so shape the horizons of our possibilities of living together.

By Christina Cielo

References:

Packard, Randall. 1990. White plague, black labor: tuberculosis and the political economy of health and disease in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

Giliomee, Hermann. 2003. The Afrikaners : biography of a people. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Giliomee, Hermann and Lawrence Schlemmer, eds. 1985. Up against the fences: poverty, passes and privilege in South Africa. Cape Town: D. Philip.

Wilson, Francis. 1985. "Mineral wealth and rural poverty: an analysis of the economic foundations of the political boundaries of South Africa," in Giliomee and Schlemmer (eds.)

Crespo, Carlos and Omar Fernandez. 2001. Los campesinos regantes de Cochabamba en la Guerra del Agua. Cochabamba: CESU/ UMSS/ FEDECOR.

Sawyer seminar - on 'race' relations

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. This posting is by Brigitte Bagnol.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

On ‘Race’ relations: Contours, lines, frontiers and borders

Taking upon Joan Scott’s invitation (1988: 44) to use her analysis of the process of construction of gender relationships to analyse other social process such as race, ethnicity and class, I would like to embark in this challenge adapting her model to “race” relations.

Paraphrasing Scott (1988: 42-49) my definition of “race” has two main parts and several interrelated elements. “Race” is a constitutive element of social relations based on perceived differences between people of different physiognomic and or physical characteristics but also of distinct linguistic and ethnic/national groups. “Race” is one of the social markers signifying relations of power. It can be a primary or a secondary way of signifying relations of power depending on the context and the structures of power of which it forms part.

Relations between groups of people of different origins or physical characteristics are also very often informed by perceived differences based on class and which are used to maintain unequal economic relation. But, for this reason, transformations in the forms of production and exploitation create different relationships and different forms of perceptions between people of different physical characteristics or origin. This is so because relations of alliances and conflicts evolve over time according to forms of production and exploitation thus modifying social boundaries and opening possibilities for the establishment of new forms of relations between people from different social classes and groups.

Social relations based on perceived differences between people of different colour and groups are influenced by factors that are specific to a context, thus stressing the importance of an emphasis on localised analysis. But they are also informed by a world history and globalized economic and cultural policies. The latter might explain why “race” relations and expressions of asymmetries, marginalization and discrimination have many similarities in France, United States, Brazil or South Africa although the history of these relations differs widely.

The question we need to ask is in what conditions and under which discursive and political situation specific differences become a determinant characteristic of relation between people? Among the factors shaping perceived differences between people of different colour/ethnicity/nationality one can distinguish the symbolic order which includes the language, signs and norms as well as the political and legal system; and the subjective identities.

1- Cultural symbols and norms (here I am condensing two categories developed by Scott)

Myths, lends, cultural concepts about colour/ethnicity/nationality associated with social value offer representations about differences that set up hierarchies. By example, dichotomic vision of white/black, pure/impure, light/dark, life/death, luck/bad luck, good/evil have influenced and might continue to influence perceptions of people of different colour/ethnicity/nationality. Cultural symbols are found and reproduced in context such as kinship, religious, educational, healing, political and legal systems and contribute to the creation of iconic and fixed identities in opposition to a reality of contestations and challenges of these symbols and norms.

2- Political context and legislation available

The national policies of inclusion or exclusion of different groups according to colour/ethnicity/nationality might or might not open possibilities for (re)imagining boundaries of identities and (re)thinking old culturally constructed archetypal identities. Policies such as Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa or the institution of racial quotas in Brazil contribute to the reformulation of identities or the fixation of identities based on colour/ethnicity/nationality.

3- Subjective identities

The search for a colour/ethnic/national identity evolves through a more or less transitory and circumstantial fixation at a certain time, in a given circumstance and along the life cycle. People with a basic colour/ethnic/national identity may play out a different colour/ethnicity/nationality identity depending on conventions, personal interest and social pressures. As queer studies indicate, identity can be separated from the physical body allowing people to experience identity without embodiment of physical characteristics. People in situations of migration experience the anxiety of non-identities, des-identities or trans-identities in-between borders, continents at the margins of assigned identities and in the process of creating a new identity. There is not a unique and monolithic way of being and feeling that one belong to a specific colour/ethnic/national identity as other markers of social identify might interfere or even supersede. Thus, aspects such as intersectionality (gender, age, kinship, lineage, religion, education, class) and performativity also need to be considered as they have a significant role in shaping perception of differences and social relations among polychromatic, polyethnic and polynational groups and individuals.

By Brigitte Bagnol

Scott, Wallach Joan. 1988. Gender a Useful Category of Historical Gender Analysis. In: Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 28-50.

Sawyer seminar - On Fences

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. Today’s blogging is by Ruth McFarlane.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

On Fences

Often it is the visually rich metaphors in the texts we prepare for our Sawyer Seminar study group sessions that stay with me the longest. This week the metaphor of “fences” was a thread throughout the readings.

Driving around, a visitor in this construction-riddled city girdled in yellow barricades, chain-link and orange plastic tarp strung between rods rammed into the earth – this city, this country, on the verge of welcoming the rest of the globe – I see fences of all kinds, both old and new. I think about people feverishly constructing a version of themselves to present to the world in a few short weeks. I think about modern cities built on layers of ancient ruins, relics of the conquered, and I wonder about all that is hidden under this new pavement.

For the April 28^th meeting, the Sawyer Seminar study group prepared texts dealing, generally, with segregation; its political and social history as well as patterns of poverty and disease and emerging labour and class hierarchies directly related to the design and implementation of pass laws and other controls of the apartheid system. It is often tempting, in our discussion of these troubling texts about the ‘old South Africa’ to spring forward and speculate about more hopeful possibilities for the future. But one participant wisely warned against moving into the future too quickly. Our first task, he reminded us, is to understand where we have been, what happened and why it happened.

An interesting theme that developed in the discussion was the relationship between notions of excess and the fences created by influx control policies. The comparison was made between the difference in the way U.S. slaves were treated before and after the British began the process of abolishing slavery, and the shifting policies regarding urban black labor in South Africa as borders beyond the city became more rigid and a labor surplus developed in rural and former “reserve” areas. Prior to abolition, the life of a slave working in the harsh conditions on plantations in the American South was understood to be seven years – slaves were literally worked to death. A steady supply of new bodies took the place of the dead. With British abolition new bodies became less readily available and the value and health of the enslaved became more relevant to the labor needs of the plantation masters. Not only did relationships change between master and slave but political tensions and legal battles arose between slave-holding states and non slave-holding states as issues of manumission, runaways, ownership of offspring, and illegal trafficking became more important.

A similar interplay of access and excess in the South African contest emerges in Giliomee and Schlemmer’s discussion of the independence of former “reserve” areas. Describing a shift in political opinion among South African leaders towards supporting the independence of Lesotho and Mozambique, the authors ask, “what nation state can be held responsible for the educational expenditure or the unemployment, old-age and other welfare benefits needed in another sovereign land?” The new sovereignty of these regions created borders at which the employment obligations of government and industry were conveniently detained. Political control remained virtually unchanged, however, as the new nations were still reliant on old, established patterns of migratory labor and highly vulnerable to economic coercion. Meanwhile, this side of the labor fence, new categories developed in urban black communities around access to jobs and in terms of permission to reside in the city permanently, quasi-permanently or only temporarily. As in the example from American slavery, new restrictions on access to employment created hierarchies within the black population and necessitated more intricate calibration of class and control. Fences created sovereignty but also denied it. Fences created new relationships not only between masters and servants but among the servants themselves.

Borders operate on our imagination and our morality. We imagine each other across the barrier and, in the process, we imagine ourselves. Slum removals, pass laws, and segregation all allowed white people to distance themselves, to imagine in various ways that the black population on the other side of the fence was irrelevant. This is, perhaps, best illustrated by Packard who highlights the drop in municipal tuberculosis statistics following the passage of the Slum Clearance Act in 1934 when black communities with high death rates were moved outside the city limit and outside the statistical population. And yet the fence is there, bearing witness, insisting silently that the people on the other side must have a terrible relevance. In his biography of the Afrikaans people, Giliomee writes about three Afrikaner leaders’ views on segregation at the beginning of the 20^th century. Although Sauer, Hertzog and Smuts differed on policy and possibility of equality, they agreed on something critical: all three men feared that equality among white and black people would spell annihilation of the white race in South Africa. The terrible relevance of blackness, otherness, pressing in at the fences served to convince the people inside that the perimeter must be protected at all costs and ratcheted to full-throttle the amorality of self-preservation.

The most dynamic moment in the discussion came close to the end of our time together when one participant admitted that she wondered how anyone could read these texts and not feel them viscerally. “These readings fucked me up. They really fucked me up.” The rawness of this comment got directly at the messiness of our project. We are a group of South Africans and foreigners from various professional and academic backgrounds, multiracial and diverse in many other respects as well. Sitting down to discuss the historical, economic, and sociopolitical context of South African policies of racial segregation, we encounter not just the fences of our collective pasts but the fences of our present and, among these, boundaries that are freighted with personal significance. In the course of our project of excavating the past, it seems impossible that we will not also dredge up deep, specific feelings about what has happened, what was done and left undone, or as one participant put it who was allowed to live and who was allowed to die.

Framing her comment, my colleague spoke about the distribution of milk to black urban locations in the 1930s as described by Packard. Her illustration asked us to focus on the horror of this one particular effect of urban segregation. The borders around black locations within the cities created economic and social conditions that severely limited access to food and literally starved black urban dwellers. Packard relates numerous studies from the 1920s and 1930s showing that black workers did not earn enough to buy food that would support basic nutritional requirements. Milk, among other staples, such as bread, was not readily available. Often only surplus milk not purchased by white consumers was delivered to black communities and even the surplus milk was too expensive for many. Instead many black city dwellers purchased condensed milk, which was more affordable because it could be diluted. Often the condensed milk was diluted until very little nutritional value remained. Not even milk, one of the most basic (and symbolic) sources of nutrition, made it through the fence unregulated. This illustration was important because it invited us, as a group, to cross the barrier between our work as scholars and our emotional response as human beings. We were reminded that a visceral reading of the text allows access to ways of understanding that are specifically located in the body. To understand who was allowed to live and who was allowed to die, to understand what happened and why it happened, it may sometimes be necessary for the texts to fuck us up.

Gilliomee and Schlemmer’s image of laborers trampling the fence around the rural labor commission office at the announcement of recruitment opportunities is, for me, both a bleak and hopeful one. Fences, laws, never keep everyone out. They can be trampled and broken as simply as they are erected if, generally, at much greater personal sacrifice and tragedy. Human beings will trample fences not just to make money but to find food, to chase the dream of a better life, to live with their families, and to have enough milk for their children. Fences can only withstand so much pressure and human beings always push very hard to survive.

Ruth McFarlane

Sawyer seminar - In a Moment of Danger

The Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was awarded a Sawyer Seminar by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a series of events during 2010 and 2011. The Seminar is to be used to develop fresh perspectives on the quandaries and puzzles of the present democratic moment in South Africa from the vantage point of the relationship between race, property and poverty and justice. More information on the series is available on http://www.sawyerseminar-wits.co.za/

The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) is hosting the series, and the first reading group on Old and New Racial Formations began last week. Over the next months, participant will reflect on the readings and the discussions on race. Today’s blogging is by Micaela Alicia Smith, a PhD student from Los Angeles, and a doctoral fellow with the JWTC.

Please feel free to participate in the developing conversation by posting comments.

Reading the Flashpoints of South African Race Relations

The Sawyer Seminar readings and discussion for April 14th centered around the themes of peace and conquest, property and privilege, and the uneven and contested racial terrain structuring South African life, both within its historical and contemporary moment.

The discussion generated some productive comments on the structures of racial and class hierarchies, specifically when thinking through the South African Frontier and the violent embattlement for land and labor between Afrikaner burgher settlers, British colonial settlers, and Xhosa peoples. “Race is the modality through which class is lived,” is one of the most well-known phrases of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. If Afrikaner historian Hermann Giliomee argues Afrikaner victimhood centered around their identification as “a subject and inferior race,” can Hall’s argument be applied to Afrikaner burghers? At the same time, Giliomee argues the relations between Afrikaner burghers and Xhosa peasants were not rooted in a racial hierarchy; rather Afrikaner insistence on creating their own nation was primarily to maintain their hierarchy based on social status. A question raised was how to think through these tensions when social status cannot be defined without invoking race. A participant commented perhaps a more productive question can be: If we take as a given the ways in which both race and class structure the political economy of settler power, we can then ask: How do race and class differently produce and animate each other depending on the particular historical moment we are looking at?

The discussion then turned to whether we can identify the set of struggles Giliomee articulates as still remaining with us today. Can we live together? In a state of conquest, how is the making of order and peace produced? Property is understood as the material possession of land and cattle but it must not be forgotten property is first and foremost the materiality of one’s own body. The economy of one’s own survival, the right to defend oneself, makes the establishment of Truth and Justice for the State especially difficult when property is also used as a weapon of war. In these moments it becomes hard to identify the enemy, the loser, the racial Other—as this Other is also always shifting, where one cannot exist/survive without the other.

Yet, to what extent lies the danger of identifying this constantly contested racial terrain and the fluidity of each historical moment that defies any clear cut answers— like the dancing play of history, as accident and event? The danger can be navigated through a return to the everyday experiences of those marginalized, Black lives, their happiness, their pain, their desires. This is to say, while the fluidity and multiple subject positions each person inhabits are well understood and accepted, we must also attend to the logic of race and capital as fixing race and class, both historically and today—this unchanging racial logic we have inherited with the centuries of violent struggle over capital accumulation. Once located within the bodies of enslaved and their extracted labor, how do we read and bear witness to the planned evictions of the urban poor in preparation for the 2010 World Cup—a plan that will leave thousands homeless in an effort to cleanse the downtown urban core? How do we read the complete destruction of living settlements as if they never were, what are the interconnected strategies for state-building that promote urban regeneration at the same time there is a move to dehumanize lived neighborhoods as 'slums' and as sites of criminality that must be “cleaned up”?

This dredge of history, this cumulative weight, this act of conquest as a set of waves always made anew, also identifies the pain that does not change, that race is continually manifest for whites and Black people through very different lived experiences and investments. A question raised was how to read white fear, generated most recently by the murder of Eugene Terreblanche. A participant argued white fear is situated primarily vis-à-vis white wealth, since it is white cumulative wealth that has been crafted from the exploitation and active disinvestment of people of color. The history of Black revolt, including the burning of township schools by Black students is an act of self-inflicted violence — by burning a symbol of class mobility, Black youth are forcing whites, and the world at large, to pay attention to them, to recognize the separate and unequal system of education structuring Black life. While the embodiment of white privilege allow whites to feel threatened only through the fear of Black revolt, Black survival, rich and poor, cannot escape race as it structures their everyday life, where they live, where they work, where they play.

In this moment, on what basis can Truth and Justice be established? We can identify the same tensions that structured the Frontier Wars between white settlers and the indigenous African nations during the 19th century as still with us today. The murder of Eugene Terreblanche perhaps can be best understood as the most recent flashpoint of race relations. It is these moments that force the public to pay attention, yet we must also pay attention to the surprising alliances and to the fissures that open up because of the inherently unstable act of conquest. These are the possibilities and dangers we must attend to and which will continue to generate discussion for us—most especially when our discussions are grounded in a close reading of the texts, as these texts illuminate the other perhaps more subtle flashpoints living with us today.

Micaela Alicia Smith