Dis/placing political illiteracy: the politics of intellectual equality in a South African shack-dwellers’ movement

Anna Selmeczi, Interface

This paper starts out with the claim that the contemporary spatio-political  order of the South African “world class” city is conditional upon constructing  many lives as superfluous and disposable. This construction partly rests on the  inherited topography of apartheid displacement which continues to push the  poor black majority into zones of invisibility and inaudibility. Beyond this  physical distancing, the production and abandonment of surplus people also  depends on rendering them as improper political subjects. In the prevailing  political discourse, poor people’s struggles are deemed less than political  through notions such as the idea that all protest is related to the pace of  “service delivery” or accusations of violence, as well as often explicit characterizations of dissenting people as ignorant.

Abahlali’s Vocal Politics of Proximity: Speaking, Suffering and Political Subjectivization

by Anna Selmeczi, October 2012

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.

“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment

“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment
PhD Thesis by Anna Selmeczi, April 2012

Starting from the observation that today the urban emerges as the main site for the production and abandonment of surplus life – a life whose capacities cannot be rendered useful and is therefore not to be fostered – in this thesis I offer a re-politicized reading of abandonment by drawing on my field-research with the largest South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Grounding this re-politicized reading in the problem of excess freedom that emerges on the horizon of governmental rationality between the political inclusion of the surplus population and their obstructive uselessness, I begin the inquiry by asking how the current order of neoliberal urbanism contains the surplus population when the establishment of the educative trusteeship of development is no longer pertinent.

Educating Resistance

by Anna Selmeczi, Interface, 2010

While deeply sympathetic to David Harvey’s commitment to a politics that can move to a new and more just order this paper, based on the experience of a period of immersion in the shack dweller’s movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, asks if Harvey’s commitment to scaling up the level of political action, along side a project of political education, risks removing politics from the grasp of the people who are currently struggling, with a considerable degree of success, to restore their right to political speech and imagination.

Challenging abandonment: The South African shack-dwellers’ “living politics” as counter-conduct

by Anna Selmeczi, 2011

In late October 2009, following members’ reports on the workshops or conferences that they attended or the journeys to which they were delegated, a middle-aged woman took the floor of Abahlali baseMjondolo’s general meeting held in the fully packed ‘Board Room’ of the office building where the movement now has its headquarters. She said she lived in Richmond Farm where years ago she bought a plot to build her shack on but for the past few months she had been threatened with eviction and the demolition of her home because the landowner sold the same piece of land to someone else; this time with a title deed. When she resisted the orders of the new owner to move out, people affiliated with the local party committee started to threaten her. Detailing the manifold and humiliating ways they are trying to chase her away – such as throwing human feces at her shack – she soon burst into tears and could not stop crying for several minutes. In their efforts to comfort her, other women in the room chanted a song and someone went out to refill an empty bottle to get her some water.

‘From shack to the Constitutional Court’: The litigious disruption of governing global cities

by Anna Selmeczi, Utrecht Law Review, April 2011

On October 14th 2009, the South African Constitutional Court judged unconstitutional and so invalidated the so-called ‘Slums Act’; a provincial legislation of KwaZulu-Natal that was also supposed to be the blueprint for other provinces’ policies of eradicating informal settlements. The decision signalled a major victory for the first applicant Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest shack dwellers’ movement that has been struggling for a dignified life in the cities since 2005. Beyond its relevance for the debates surrounding the justiciability of social and economic rights so famously included in the South African Constitution, when viewed from the perspective of the shack dwellers’ mobilization, the case appears to manifest contemporary technologies of power; the various practices that shape urban spaces and determine what kind of lives should inhabit them. Indeed, in rationalizing the municipal effort to eliminate shack settlements from urban centres with sanitary concerns and justifying evictions with the will to improve poor people’s living conditions, the ‘Slums Act’ reflects biopolitics in action.

“We are the people who don’t count” – Contesting biopolitical abandonment

by Anna Selmeczi

About a year before his lecture series “Society Must be Defended!”, in which he first elaborated the notion of biopolitics, in a talk given in Rio de Janeiro, Foucault discussed the “Birth of the Social Medicine”. As a half-way stage of the evolution of what later became public health, between the German ‘state medicine’ and the English ‘labor-force medicine’, he described a model taking shape in the 18th century French cities and referred to it as ‘urban medicine’. With view to the crucial role of circulation in creating a healthy milieu, the main aim of this model was to secure the purity of that which circulates, thus, potential sources of epidemics or endemics had to be placed outside the flaw of air and water nurturing urban life. According to Foucault (2000a), it was at this period that “piling-up refuse” was problematized as hazardous and thus places producing or containing refuse – cemeteries, ossuaries, and slaughterhouses – were relocated to the outskirts of the towns.