The Provocations of Neoliberalism: Contesting the Nation and Liberation after Apartheid

Abstract: This paper is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of the turbulent forces at play in South Africa in relation to other parts of the world. Engaging debates over neoliberalism from a South African vantage point, I show how currently influential theories cast in terms of class project, governmentality, and hegemony are at best partial. A more adequate understanding is not just a matter of combining these different dimensions into a more encompassing model of “neoliberalism in general”. The challenge, rather, is coming to grips with how identifiably neoliberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them. A crucially important dimension of what is going on in South Africa is that escalating struggles over the material conditions of life and livelihood are simultaneously struggles over the meaning of the nation and liberation, as well as expressions of profound betrayal. These processes underscore the analytical and political stakes in attending to interconnected historical geographies of specifically racialized forms of dispossession, and how they feature in the present. The paper concludes with a call for a properly post‐colonial frame of understanding that builds on the synergies and complementarities between a Gramscian reading of Fanon and relational conceptions of the production of space set forth by Lefebvre.     

Democratisation and Ethnic Conflict: The Kin Connection

Abstract. This article posits that individuation is a determining factor in making democratisation efforts workable or, where it is absent, ethnic conflict likely. Somalia serves as a case study. Since the Somali state has not been able to secure individuals' social welfare or their futures, citizens use genealogies, which chart trustworthiness, to construct social welfare safety-nets. There is also a moral dimension to genealogy. This is quite different from what occurs in the democratic West, where the state has guaranteed individuals a significant measure of social welfare security over time, and where identity can be considered situational. I argue that under conditions of uncertainty, such as have existed in Somalia, identity is not at all situational, but is fixed and fixes individuals in ethnic groups. The push to democratise can then lead to armed ethnic conflict.     

Madonna and Child of Soweto: Black Life Beyond Apartheid and Democracy

ABSTRACT

South African artist Laurence Vincent Scully’s 1973 painting, Madonna and Child of Soweto, offers an analytical tool for understanding the capacity of public religion to advance black life. The author argues that this image censures apartheid violence against black persons and reimagines a just sociality by displaying sacred, black motherhood and infancy in the figures Mary and Jesus. Their temporality and corporeality, when analyzed with a queer womanist method, gestate sacred public religion that exceeds both the apartheid governance of the past and also the secular, post-apartheid democracy of today.     

The Spending-Service Connection

This research tests the relationship between state and local spending for health and hospitals, a set of health service measures, and three final policy outcomes—low birthweight infants, infant mortality, and child deaths. The analysis includes several proxies for service demand—state resources, percentage of single-teen births, and percentage of the population without health insurance. The multiple regression equations also incorporate a measure of federal spending on health and an indicator of state spending for Medicaid. This first stage of the analysis can account for only a limited amount of variation in per capita state and local health and hospital spending. Health expenditures, however, are prominently related to health workers per 10,000 population, while hospital spending buys hospital beds. The final step in the analysis uses path models. The results show that neither spending nor the intermediate-level health outputs (including a measure of prenatal care) are significantly related to the final three outcome variables. Single-teen births is the dominant influence in the final equations.     

Practices of Solidarity: Opposing Apartheid in the Centre of London

International solidarity is frequently presented as an asymmetrical flow of assistance travelling from one place to another. In contrast, we theorise the more complex, entangled and reciprocal flows of solidarity that serve to enact social change in more than one place simultaneously. The international campaign against apartheid was one of the most widespread, sustained social movements of the last century. This paper examines the spatial practices of the Non‐Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London (1986–1990). Drawing on archival and interview material, we examine how the Picket produced solidarity with those resisting apartheid in South(ern) Africa. We argue that how the need for anti‐apartheid solidarity was framed politically cannot be understood in isolation from how it was performed in practice. The study of solidarity is enriched by paying attention to the micropolitics of the practices through which it is enacted and articulated through key sites.     

Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia

International diplomacy has been one of a number of practices which have performatively constituted “Bosnia” as a particular place with specific people, so that it could be rendered as a problem requiring a particular solution. Even when, as in the case of the Dayton accords, negotiators claim they have desired the reintegration of Bosnia, their reliance on a powerful set of assumptions about identity, territoriality and politics—a particular political anthropology—has meant the ethnic partition of a complex and heterogeneous society is the common product of the international community's efforts. Paying attention to the role of cartography, this paper explores the apartheid-like logic of international diplomacy's political anthropology, the way this logic overrode non-nationalist options and legitimised exclusivist projects during the war, and considers the conundrum this bequeaths Bosnia in the post-Dayton period as a number of significant local forces seek to overcome division.This article is accompanied by a web-site which presents the relevant maps from the periods of international diplomacy discussed here, along with a further commentary. Referred to in the article as Campbell (1999), this web-site can be accessed at http://www.newcastle.ac.uk/~npol/maps/bosnia     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism

This essay examines gay journalism as gay liberation literature to model a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual rights activism. The primary archive used is Link/Skakel, the official newsletter of the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which soon became a mainstream gay newspaper called Exit. I first describe debates around the term Afropolitanism to describe how the development of a gay and lesbian subculture in Johannesburg was influenced by models of gay consumerism and activism in the North. Next, I examine the controversial legal reforms initiated by GASA without challenging racial discrimination and segregation, reflecting a consumption based identity politics. The direction of comparison from North-South and the exclusivist racial and gendered assumptions were challenged by a ‘queer Afropolitanism’ connecting racial and sexual liberation, articulated first by lesbians in GASA and later, the Gays and Lesbians of Witwatersrand (GLOW). In conclusion, I indicate how the transformation of the Johannesburg based gay liberation movement reflecting sexual, racial, and geographical diversity is not reflected in its associated publications, which degenerate into tabloid style journalism.     

The Australian Assistance Plan and the Canadian Connection: Origins and Legacies

Within the context of the war on poverty and an acknowledgement of the wider global phenomenon of a ‘post-industrial society’, the Australian Labor Party under Gough Whitlam sought out a range of reforming and innovative social policy programs. This article explores the origins of one such program, the Australian Assistance Plan (AAP), and its connections, similarities and differences to the Canada Assistance Plan. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history sources, it offers a comparative analysis of both national programs, then outlines how international social planning and community development ideas, especially from Canada, infused the AAP and its predecessor, the Geelong Experiment.     

南非种族隔离制与阿非利卡人政治经济优势地位的确立

本文考察和分析了南非阿非利卡人政治经济优势与种族隔离制之间的内在历史联系。 2 0世纪初期的阿非利卡人陷入了深刻的经济危机 ,通过种族隔离制的选举制度 ,阿非利卡人控制了南非政权 ,确立了自身的政治优势地位 ,并在此基础上进一步强化经济领域中的种族隔离制政策法规 ,最终实现了阿非利卡人经济崛起的目标。     

Impacts of an Iron and Steel Plant on Residential Property Values

The hedonic price method is used to estimate the relationship between residential property values and proximity to an integrated iron and steel plant located in the outskirts of Gijón, a city in the north of Spain. Empirical results suggest that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between housing values and the distance from the iron and steel plant. From a partial equilibrium analysis, increasing the distance from the plant, decreasing plant production or dismantling the plant would lead to an increase in the value of the housing units. The results show as well that the housing units located nearest to the factory would be the most favoured by applying the aforementioned changes.