Suchergebnisse

Post-apartheid South Africa has been characterized by race tensions, social inequalities, and unemployment that are contributing to widespread crises. In addressing the transition to democracy, Limits to Liberation examines issues of culture and identity, drawing attention to the creative agency of citizens of the "new" South Africa. The writers question the classical western model of citizenship and procedural democracy in the face of the inability of most African states to provide basic needs. Their bold, interdisciplinary inquiry contributes to South African and international scholarship on urban planning, governance, and citizenship. The author Steven L. Robins is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the media images and public discourses that surrounded the 2011 'open toilet scandal' or what came to be known as the '2011 Toilet Elections' and the 'Toilet Wars'. Widely circulated media images of unenclosed modern, porcelain toilets struck a raw nerve as the nation was preparing to vote in local government elections, and produced responses of shock from politicians and ordinary citizens, partly because these images seemed to condense and congeal long historical processes of racism and apartheid. Whereas the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was understood to be the key transitional justice mechanism in the mid‐1990s, by the late 1990s the TRC was no longer at the centre of political life, and its mythology of national reconciliation and 'new beginnings' was being widely contested. What replaced it was a 'messy' popular politics that was preoccupied with issues relating to land, housing, sanitation, service delivery, labour conditions and employment equity. The TRC's narrowly conceived conception of transitional justice seemed unable to address these struggles to improve conditions of everyday life. The article concludes that these forms of popular politics reveal the limits and possibilities of engaging with the unfinished business of the 1994 democratic transition by developing a localized politics of transitional social justice.

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights‐based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the "near death" experiences of full‐blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and "social death" associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to "new life" and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV‐positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen–activist and member of a social movement.

AbstractThis article questions some of the key assumptions of post‐development and anti‐development critics such as Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, who tend to prescribe a puritanical and principled rejection of 'exogenous development' that does not necessarily reflect the needs and desires of the beneficiaries of development. Drawing on fieldwork research on land claims in Northern Cape and Northern Provinces (South Africa), the author argues that these beneficiaries tend to deploy hybrid and highly selective and situational responses to development interventions. These hybrid responses can be regarded as indigenous modernities. Development packages are resisted, embraced, reshaped or accommodated depending on the specific content and context. The author also questions James Ferguson's conclusion that depoliticizing development discourses inevitably buttresses bureaucratic state power. Rather, the fieldwork findings suggest that state‐led development is often an extremely risky business that can undermine the legitimacy and authority of governments. In addition, in many parts of the developing world, it is the retreat of the neo‐liberal state, rather than 'the tyranny of development', that poses the most serious threat to household livelihood strategies and economic survival. The case studies discussed here suggest that responses to development are usually neither wholesale endorsements nor radical rejections of modernity. Even when resisting and subverting development ideas and practices, people do not generally do so on the basis of either radical populist politics or in defence of pristine and authentic local cultural traditions.