Using as its point of departure the claim that today the
urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article
explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers’
movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political
subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali
disrupt the order of the ‘world-class city’ when they expose the contradiction
between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of
the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified
breach of the promise of ‘a better life’, the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as
political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a
political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative
to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them
by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the
experiences of life in the shantytown.
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