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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 contribution offers some observations with regard to political identities in a pop- ular movement largely based in the shantytowns of Durban, South Africa.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nostalgia has become an apt concept to elicit the examination of traces of the past upon the present. In this presentation, I am concerned with a particular kind of nostalgia, or, what I call, here, urban nostalgia.
What do we do with the relics of race science in South Africa? My research focuses on the Bushman lifecasts currently housed in Iziko Museum in Cape Town. Dozens of casts were made in the first half of the 20th Century with the aim of classifying different races, specifically Bushmen.
In democratic situations, "activism" and "mobilization" tend to be almost synonymous with "challenging". The analysis of student militancy in authoritarian situation in Cameroon calls that into question.
At the beginning of the 1930s, the ANC, the ICU and CPSA were in disarray, and a small group of activist-intellectuals looked to new sources of inspiration in their struggles to liberate South Africa’s oppressed masses.
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?
Over the last decade, the Wits School of Clinical Medicine has increased efforts to develop a new generation of doctors who produce research, or who are at least research-literate.
This paper proposes the oceanic south to navigate various conceptions of southness, while registering a more turbulent alterity and materiality than they sometimes admit.
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).
[An extract in place of an abstract:] How then might one talk about the ‘reading’ that Customs official undertook from an OOO or speculative realist position? Most obviously, officials were object-oriented.
Cape Town boasts roughly two dozen sacred Muslim tombs, known as kramats, which mark the resting places of pious, 17th and 18th century exiles from around the Indian Ocean basin.
In this paper I want to examine the reasons for the impressively consistent disinterest in African economics that runs through the four styles of comparative political economy that the journal Economy & Society – the most important forum for comparative economic sociology – has pu
