African Modernity and the Struggle for People’s Power: From Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizing

African Modernity and the Struggle for People’s Power: From Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizin... by TigersEye99

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.” 

African Modernity and the Struggle for People's Power: From Protest and Mobilization to Community Organizing

Xolela Mangcu

by Xolela Mangcu, The Good Society, Volume 21, Number 2, 2012, pp. 279-299 

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Populism has been a controversial term in South African public discourse in recent years precisely because it has been used as a tool in the lexical armoury of the combatants in the battle for the leadership of the ruling African National Congress. In order to understand why populism has been denigrated to great effect by the political, economic and social elite one has to have some idea of the historical resistance to popular democracy by African elites going back to the nineteenth century.

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Jacques Rancière

Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today. Verso

The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass

Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.

The road to Polokwane? Politics and populismin KwaZulu-Natal

The road to Polokwane? Politics and populism in KwaZulu-Natal by TigersEye99

Class, Nation, Ethnicity in Natal's black working class

Sitas, Ari (1990) Class, Nation, Ethnicity in Natal's black working class. Collected Seminar Papers. Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 38 . pp. 257-278. ISSN 0076-0773

Click here to download this paper in pdf.