Gill Hart: 'Political Society' & Its Discontents: South African Reflections on Indian Debates

Public Lecture & Post-Graduate Master Class with Gillian Hart

South Africa: Understanding the turmoil

Gill Hart, Al Jazeera

Shortly after the 20th anniversary of liberation from apartheid, South Africans will go to the polls on May 7. Most pundits predict that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will be re-elected, although with a reduced majority. Yet the tensions and turmoil roiling the country are likely to continue after the election, for reasons that go well beyond conventional understandings.

Eroding support for the ANC from within its ranks is dramatic. Prominent veterans of the liberation struggle are calling for people to spoil their ballots rather than vote for the ANC.

Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

Rethinking the South African Crisis

We are very pleased to announce that Gillian Hart will be giving this year’s Thinking Africa Public Lecture on the 15th of August. Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Gillian Hart’s forthcoming book is about to come out with UKZN Press.

The publishers describe the book as follows:

“Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits longstanding debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Gillian Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts and struggles in the arenas of everyday life, feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and renationalisation. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of ANC domination, and the proliferation of populist politics. This book provides an innovative and forceful dialectical analysis of the ongoing, unstable and unresolved processes through which the crisis in South Africa is playing out. It also suggests how Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated in relation to present circumstances, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.” 

Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics

Michael Ekers (Editor), Gillian Hart (Editor), Stefan Kipfer (Editor), Alex Loftus (Editor) 

This unique collection is the first to bring attention to Antonio Gramsci’s work within geographical debates. Presenting a substantially different reading to Gramsci scholarship, the collection forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory.

• Offers the first sustained attempt to foreground Antonio Gramsci’s work within geographical debates
• Demonstrates how Gramsci articulates a rich spatial sensibility whilst developing a distinctive approach to geographical questions
• Presents a substantially different reading of Gramsci from dominant post-Marxist perspectives, as well as more recent anarchist and post-anarchist critiques
• Builds on the emergence of Gramsci scholarship in recent years, taking this forward through studies across multiple continents, and asking how his writings might engage with and animate political movements today
• Forges a new approach within human geography, environmental studies and development theory, building on Gramsci’s innovative philosophy of praxis

The Provocations of Neoliberalism: Contesting the Nation and Liberation after Apartheid

Gillian Hart, Antipode,Volume 40, Issue 4, pages 678–705, September 2008 
(This paper is also available in pdf here)

This paper is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of the turbulent forces at play in South Africa in relation to other parts of the world. Engaging debates over neoliberalism from a South African vantage point, I show how currently influential theories cast in terms of class project, governmentality, and hegemony are at best partial. A more adequate understanding is not just a matter of combining these different dimensions into a more encompassing model of “neoliberalism in general”. The challenge, rather, is coming to grips with how identifiably neoliberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them. A crucially important dimension of what is going on in South Africa is that escalating struggles over the material conditions of life and livelihood are simultaneously struggles over the meaning of the nation and liberation, as well as expressions of profound betrayal. These processes underscore the analytical and political stakes in attending to interconnected historical geographies of specifically racialized forms of dispossession, and how they feature in the present. The paper concludes with a call for a properly post-colonial frame of understanding that builds on the synergies and complementarities between a Gramscian reading of Fanon and relational conceptions of the production of space set forth by Lefebvre.