The Politics of Aspiration and the End of Utopia
As part of a two-day workshop on aspiration, exclusion and belonging in South Africa and Kenya: cross-regional dialogues, to be held on 7-8 October 2015 at WiSER
In different ways, South Africa and Kenya are regional centres in terms of their economic, cultural and political influence. Both countries are praised for having some of the most progressive and inclusive constitutions in the world – yet at the same time they are at the forefront of internal and international debates on how democracy is performed, and how citizenship is distributed and acquired. Both countries are facing extreme levels of inequality while simultaneously they are home to some of the continent's largest middle-class populations with increased possibilities for consumption, education and new forms of self-identification and collective identity formation. Furthermore, both countries host large migrant and refugee populations involving both political and public challenges concerning questions of inclusion, security, and xenophobia. All these developments take on different expressions in the two countries and have provoked different political responses and different public reactions. This short – and far from exhaustive – list of examples of some current trends and developments in South Africa and Kenya allow for discussions of similarities and differences across the two countries in the hope that a broadened perspective will provoke new insights on localized topics.
WiSER invites you to a keynote lecture by
Achille Mbembe
The Politics of Aspiration and the End of Utopia
Wednesday, 7th October 2015
4:00 for 4:30pm
WiSER Seminar Room, 6th Floor,
Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University
Refreshments will be served.
The ambition of the workshop is not to force systemic comparison between the two countries, rather the workshop seeks to facilitate analytical dialogues between these two African hubs and influential metropolitan centres in order to shed new light on localised expressions of wider dynamics and developments. While departing from and taking local specificities serious the workshop encourages a cross-regional conversation on some of the processes that characterise the two countries in different ways, ranging from the intersection of securitization policies and the everyday politics of security to the aspirational formation of middle-class and migrant identities and the struggles for recognition and belonging. Discussing how different localised expressions of aspirational modes of being (individual and collective) influence and overlap with various forms of exclusion (whether systemic or everyday) will allow for new understandings of topical societal and political issues within, across and beyond the two countries.
Themes: Following a keynote address from Professor Achille Mbembe on African cosmopolitanism and aspiration, we plan the workshop to be organised around the following themes:
- Citizenship and belonging
- Registration and ID documents, securitization
- Straddling certainty and precarity
- Intra-African movements between eastern and southern Africa
- New middle class aspirations and identities: gender, health, consumerism, and sexuality