Seminars

Social grants have become increasingly important income for many in South Africa. Grants are not welcomed by all however: in the village where I completed fieldwork as many as seventy per cent of its inhabitants rely on grants, people regard such transfers with suspicion.

Co-hosted with CISA

The paper explores various aspects in the development of the Palestinian national movement, with a focus on the ways in which it has conceptualized its core political goals. In particular, it looks at the extent to which it can be regarded as an anti-colonial or anti-apartheid movement.

This chapter documents the emergence of the local manufacturing of skin lighteners in South Africa, and the linked and shifting markets for these cosmetics in the United States and South Africa.

This a story within a story, and the first story ends like this: on Monday, September 15, 1980, Silverman Jara was stoned to death.

In 2002 a year before receiving the Nobel Prize, John Maxwell Coetzee relocated from Cape Town to Adelaide, an undistinguished provincial capital in southern Australia with a population of a million and a quarter.

“Freedom and Resentment” is a paper I return to again and again. I think it’s a really fascinating, deep, subtle, incredibly important and sometimes really quite annoying paper.

The last 30 years of capitalist development have, especially in what used to be called the advanced capitalist countries, generated paradoxical, if not contradictory trends. The “great crisis” (Galbraith, xi) of 2008 was rooted in an ideological failure.

South Africa found itself on the front pages of the world’s press in 2012 when police shot and killed 34 miners during a strike by rock-drillers at the Marikana platinum mine.

Every country in the world has now legally abolished slavery, yet millions of people continue to be trapped in forms of human bondage which are widely regarded as similar and/or equivalent to abusive conditions under historical slave systems.

African jazz, also known as mbaqanga and less frequently as Majuba jazz, occupies an important but ambivalent position in the story of South African music.

The term ‘moffie’ stands central to changing discourses around abnormal or deviant Afrikaner masculinity in apartheid South Africa.

This chapter examines a case of community protest in a single town, which we call Kungcatsha 1 , which was rocked by two weeks of violent community protests in the second half of 2009.

This paper is part of a larger project that examines two related issues: (1) the extent to which the notion of 'apartheid' is applicable to Israel/Palestine today, and (2) the extent to which we can engage in a meaningful historical comparison between Israel/Palestine and South African societies.

This draft chapter is part of my current book project that examines the production, consumption, and opposition to skin lighteners in South Africa and tracks how these processes were intimately related to developments in Europe, Asia, East Africa, the broader southern Africa region, and particula

This article offers a fresh analysis of a key reformist gesture by General Smuts’s Second
World War South African government – the May 1942 order suspending police enforcement
of the pass laws in many of the country’s major cities. Hated by Africans for the curbs they

The primary focus of  this chapter is to illustrate the impact that the daily writing practice of  keeping a diary had on the development of  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's philosophical and political practices.

In a world populated by so many acronyms, GFIP makes a good example of a ‘technical’ name given to a megaproject with potentially wide social effects that remained submerged for most of its life.

Political division within Afrikanerdom in the early 1980s hit the Broederbond as hard as it hit all other Afrikaner institutions.  The establishment of the Tricameral Parliament was a turning-point not only because it precipitated uprisings in the African townships, but also because the establish