Some historians of the British Empire have argued that the post-1857 Empire reflected a turn away from liberalism in favour of pre-existing sources of hegemony which were reactivated under colonialism and opposed the liberal rationalist agenda of imperialism with considerable success.
This paper investigates, theorises and seeks to understand the movement of womxn in and around Johannesburg—interrogating the politics of gender and sexuality as it relates to migration and mobility.
Kant’s philosophy centrally focusses on trying to give an a priori account of conditions of the possibility of various human phenomena, including metaphysics, empirical knowledge, there being moral reasons and the nature of just political power.
My concern here is a small, but important slice of the South African Anthropocene: the undermining, by coal mining, of the sub-surface of Sasolburg, the South African company town set up in the 1950s by the apartheid state.
Historians of medicine in South Africa have demonstrated that in the late 19th and 20th centuries instances of South African medical research and clinical innovation gained global recognition, notably in malaria and tuberculosis work; in malnutrition and breastfeeding studies; in emergency medici
Social protest is not a new phenomenon in Ghana, as protests have been from pre-independence era as a tool of engagement between the citizens and the state.
NWFZs are a firm feature of the global nuclear political landscape, affecting territories from Africa to Latin America, and from the South Pacific to Southeast Asia. Yet traditional and critical scholars alike have under-valued the importance of this occurrence.
The global rise of Pentecostalism and other relatively charismatic forms of Christianity has prompted extensive commentary in the social sciences, whether through the lens of syncretic cultural practice, psychological experiences of transcendence, or the socioeconomic logics of millennial capital
This paper seeks to answer the following question: (1) how does the concept of ‘the state’ obfuscate our understandings of the causes of (socio)political instability? The paper critically engages existing literature on ‘the state’ in order to shed light on existing definitions of the concept.
Please do not circulate or quote since this is work in progress. It is the draft of a book prospectus in the making. I hope that our discussion will help me to improve it.
In this talk, I argue that the psychoanalytic concepts of shame and envy—when framed at the societal level—are not only among the principal drivers of violence in South Africa, they are also responses to violence in the broadest sense of the term, that is, violence understood as &ldqu
This contribution offers some observations with regard to political identities in a pop- ular movement largely based in the shantytowns of Durban, South Africa.
This paper deals with ways of approaching architecture within the shifting uncertainties of the giant Congolese capital. Taking a cue from Kinshasa, I will make a case for being receptive to what the current situation of built matter in urban space has to say.
Transformation is a topical issue within cricket circles in South Africa and will continue to remain so until there is redress. The study of cricket and transformation can be viewed as a social metaphor that allows for the analysis on socio- economic issues in the country.
The transition in South Africa from apartheid to a constitutional democracy with equal rights for all has been described and celebrated in innumerable accounts. The best overview is probably Patti Waldmeir’s, Anatomy of a Miracle.
In Mozambican bureaucratic practice “arquivo morto”, literally translated as “dead archive” refers to a site where documents that are inactive or have been taken out of circulation are kept before they are eventually destroyed.
The international financial system is one of the most powerful forces shaping both the global economy and the domestic political economy in many countries around the world.
Under the emergence of modernity, captivity, or more precisely, its dynamic traces a living experience of the new; the production or invention of the americas as the new.
South Africa’s legal system maintains its legitimacy despite the commonplace experiences of injustice that take place at the hands of the criminal justice system.
In 1952, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) agreed to establish a commission to study the “racial situation” in South Africa, a topic that had been raised in the organization since 1946, when India first brought the “treatment of Indians” under white rule to t
The role of trust in long-distance trade has long been a topic of scholarly inquiry and debate amongst economists, sociologists and historians. Much of this literature hinges on the social, legal and economic structures that undergird – if not obviate – the concept of trust.
Governing Islam traces the colonial roots of contemporary struggles between Islam and secularism in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The book uncovers the paradoxical workings of colonial laws that promised to separate secular and religious spheres, but instead fostered their vexed entanglement.
This paper operationalises a concept of nourishment in relation to an ethnographic account of a day at a soup kitchen in Kylemore, in the Dwars river Valley, South Africa.
The idea of a specific configuration called an “African Political Theology” (henceforth APT) raises a number of interrelated questions centred on definition (nomenclature), tradition (relationships), and development (sustainability).
Suspicion. The term evokes so many moods, so much affect, used as ways of reading the world: uncertainty, fear, anxiety, doubt, and the unknown. But also their opposites: faith, trust, confidence, certainty, the known and knowable. Is suspicion the defining feature of our times?
This paper proposes the oceanic south to navigate various conceptions of southness, while registering a more turbulent alterity and materiality than they sometimes admit.