The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa Invites you to a talk by Dr. Kerry Chance. ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Anthropology Department, Harvard
University
"We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp
Today": Development Futures in Democratic South Africa
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.’
Date: July 30 2013
Time: 10-11am
