'Unlearning' hegemony : an exploration of the applicability of Alain Badiou's theory of the event to informal learning through an examination of the life histories of South African social movement activists.

Anne Harley, 2012

This thesis argues that it is both necessary and possible to change the world. Changing the world requires engaging with, to try to understand it from the basis of lived reality, and then acting. Our ability to do this is, however, affected by hegemony, which attempts to convince us that the way things are is either normal and natural and the only possible way they could be, or that it is impossible to change them. Nevertheless, there is always resistance to this and I suggest that we might learn something useful by examining how this happens. The thesis thus explores Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and its applicability to our current world; and also considers resistance to this. I argue that the nature of capitalism has shifted, and discuss how this shift has impacted on hegemony, identifying three current interlocking hegemonic ideologies. I consider current resistance to this hegemony, including the role of social movements. Much resistance, and many social movements, I argued, cannot properly be called counter-hegemonic in that, although it/they may critique the dominant economic system, it/they remain trapped within hegemonic logic. However, it is clear that there is existing truly counter-hegemonic resistance, including some social movements, and I argue that Abahlali baseMjondolo is one such counter-hegemonic movement. Thus it is possible that those who join/align themselves with this movement might be considered to have ‘unlearned’ hegemony and be useful subjects for this study. I thus consider the life stories of seven people who have aligned themselves to this movement, in order to determine whether they have indeed ‘unlearned’ hegemony, and if so, how.

Richard Turner's Contribution to a Socialist Political Culture in South Africa 1968 - 1978

William Keniston, MA Thesis, 2010

Richard Turner, a banned political science lecturer from the University of Natal, was assassinated on the 8th of January, 1978. In the ten years preceding, Turner had been actively involved in a wide range of activities radically opposed to apartheid and capitalism. Turner was a remarkable professor, who taught his students more through questioning and dialogue than lecture. Turner had a significant impact on left wing white students. He played an important role in encouraging white activists to understand Black Consciousness as a radical politics to be embraced, rather than shunned. Turner encouraged whites to find a role for themselves within a struggle that he saw as driven by Black demands and programmes. In addition, Turner was involved in the emerging trade union movement, following the wildcat strikes in 1973. He participated in creating the Institute for Industrial Education, which had a curriculum focused on increasing class consciousness amongst workers building democratic trade unions.

Bare Life in the Bantustans (of the Eastern Cape): Re-membering the. Centennial South African Nation-State

by Ashley Westaway, 2008

This thesis argues that 1994 did not mark a point of absolute discontinuity in the history of South Africa. More specifically, it asserts that 1994 did not signal the end of segregationism; instead of democracy leading to national integration, the Bantustans are still governed and managed differently from the rest of the country. Consequently, it is no surprise that they remain mired in pervasive, debilitating poverty fifteen years after 1994. In insisting that contemporary South Africa is old (rather than new), the thesis seeks to make a contribution to political struggles that aim to bring to an end the segregationist past-in-the-present.

“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.

‘Wash Me Black Again’: African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and KwaZulu Natal, 1944-1960

by Jon Soske, PhD Thesis

My dissertation combines a critical history of the Indian diaspora’s political and intellectual impact on the development of African nationalism in South Africa with an analysis of African/Indian racial dynamics in Natal. Beginning in the 1940s, tumultuous debates among black intellectuals over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa played a central role in the emergence of new and antagonistic conceptualizations of a South African nation. The writings of Indian political figures (particularly Gandhi and Nehru) and the Indian independence struggle had enormous influence on a generation of African nationalists, but this impact was mediated in complex ways by the race and class dynamics of Natal. During the 1930s and 40s, rapid and large-scale urbanization generated a series of racially-mixed shantytowns surrounding Durban in which a largely Gujarati and Hindi merchant and landlord class provided the ersatz urban infrastructure utilized by both Tamil-speaking workers and Zulu migrants. In Indian-owned buses, stores, and movie theatres, a racial hierarchy of Indian over African developed based on the social grammars of property, relationship with land, family structure, and different gender roles. In such circumstances, practices integral to maintaining diasporic identities — such as religious festivals, marriage, caste (jati), language, and even dress and food—became signifiers of ranked status and perceived exclusion. Despite the destruction of this urban landscape by forced removals beginning in the late 1950s, these social relationships powerfully shaped African and Indian identities in Natal, the popular memory of different communities, and the later politics of the anti-apartheid struggle.

The Legacy of Frantz Fanon: culture, class & the psychology of oppression

by Shane William Hopkinson

This thesis discusses the work of the revolutionary social theorist and psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon.  Recent appropriations of his work have been in the area of postcolonial discourse analysis while his earlier popularity rested on his contribution to debates about class and revolutionary social change.  This thesis seeks to rehistoricise Fanon by examining his work in the colonial context and the ways it has been appropriated since then.  Part One provides the reader with an overview of the complete range of Fanon’s work.  Part Two looks at a number of appropriations of Fanon’s work and finally Part Three begins the process of assessing Fanon’s contemporary relevance.

Re-imagining South Africa: Black Consciousness, radical Christianity and the New Left, 1967 – 1977

by Ian Macqueen, PhD Thesis, 2011

This thesis places Black Consciousness in comparative perspective with progressive politics in South Africa in the late 1960s and the 1970s. It argues that the dominant scholarly focus on Black Consciousness, which is passed over as a ‘stage’ in the Black struggle against white supremacy, insufficiently historicises the deeper roots, and the wider resonances and ideological contestations of the Black Consciousness movement. As they refined their political discourse, Black Consciousness activists negotiated their way through the progressive ideologies that flourished as part of the wider political and social ferment of the 1960s. Although Black Consciousness won over an influential minority of radical Christians, a more contested struggle took place with nascent feminism on university campuses and within the Movement; as well as with a New Left-inspired historical and political critique that gained influence among white activists.

Frantz Fanon and the Dialetic of Decolonisation

by Siphiwe Ndlovu

It has been more than five decades since the wave of decolonization swept across Africa. For people on the continent, the rise to power by the former liberation movements brought hope for a better future in the post-colonial state. However later developments showed that independence would, in fact, not change the material and social conditions of the ordinary people. Although the national liberation movement took over the government of the former colony, colonial institutions and structures of power, which were founded on
economic exploitation of the colony, remained unchanged. Thus in this thesis I set out to examine Frantz Fanon’s thought in order to provide a critique of post-independence failures in Africa.

Frantz Fanon & the Dialectic of Solidarity

by Richard Pithouse

The idea of dialectical praxis runs through out this project. E. P. Thompson writes that "dialectics was rudely snatched out of our grasp and made into the plaything of scholasticism" (2001:451). The aim here is snatch it back and to assert dialectical philosophy as the living logic of revolt. For this reason the fifth and final chapter seeks to develop an argument about what it might mean to take Fanon seriously in contemporary South Africa. The arguments developed here owe much to the activist and Africanist readings of Fanon by Ato Sekyi-Otu and Nigel Gibson and argue for an intellectual praxis of transformative dialogical engagement within nodes of militant resistance.