The Harvard Social Anthropology Program Seminar Series
Presents
"Governing ‘the Poor’: Development Futures in
Democratic South Africa"
A talk by Kerry Chance (Harvard University)
4:15 p.m. Monday, April 8th 2013
William James Hall 15:50
Harvard University
This talk examines shifting political meanings of housing
evictions in democratic South Africa.
Since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, townships and shack
settlements – commemorated in liberation histories as heroic battlegrounds and
shameful testaments to apartheid – have been recast in public discourse as
‘slums,’ zones of de facto criminality, earmarked for clearance or
development. In recent years, residents
have been moved en masse away from public spaces to ‘transit camps,’ the latest
technology of slum elimination that is reshaping the urban periphery. Street
protests against these evictions have been officially condemned and met with
brutality by police and private security forces. While state agents justify
evictions under a liberal logic of progressively realized rights and inclusive
citizenship, residents see continuities with apartheid-era removals and new
forms of exclusion at the intersections of race and class. I argue, by studying
these interactions between residents and state agents, governmental modes of
managing slum populations and relations of force become visible, and with them,
emerging political practices of a collectively self-identified ‘poor.’
