What Happened to the “Promised Land”? A Fanonian Perspective on Post‐Apartheid South Africa

Abstract: This paper reviews post‐apartheid South Africa through Fanon's critical analysis of decolonization. Since, for Fanon, apartheid represented the purest form of the Manichean politics of space that characterizes colonialism, a Fanonian perspective on South Africa asks to what extent has the geographical layout of apartheid been remapped? Addressing this question necessitates shifting the “geography of reason” from technical discourses of policy‐makers to the lived reality of the “damned of the earth”. From this perspective, Fanon's critique becomes relevant in two ways, first as a prism to understand the rise of xenophobic violence as a symptom of the degeneration of the idea of South Africa's “promised land” and second as a way to listen to a new grassroots shack dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is challenging both neoliberal and progressive assumptions by advocating a quite different geographic layout for a “truly democratic” society.     

Race,Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard

This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as formerly industrial and contaminated properties, in the 1990s brownfields emerged as the grounds for new forms of urbanization and an emerging environmental remediation industry. Through their redevelopment, the twentieth century's urban wastelands—environmentally degraded, economically divested, and often racially marked—have become sites of investment, resignification, and value formation. The concept of waste formations provides a critical framework on the ways these socio‐ecological transformations rework twentieth century urban inequalities—in particular, the articulation of waste and toxic waste—and the ways they produce new geographies of environmental injustice through the displacement of toxic waste to newly waste‐able spaces. This paper develops an analytic of waste formations and applies it to the process of brownfield redevelopment at the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeast San Francisco.     

People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture,Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London

The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

Jean Améry's Concept of Resentment at the Crossroads of Ethics and Politics

The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nature by introducing and discussing Jean Améry's concept of resentment. Central to Améry's view of resentment is the restoration of the victim's social status and dignity, the validation of the experience of victimhood; his view therefore contrasts with the Nietzschean derogative view of ressentiment. On the basis of Améry's conceptualizations and with reference to Derrida's notions of “hiatus” and “forgiveness as impossibility,” the article problematizes the relation of ethics and politics—which the “transitional justice” project takes as given. It suggests that to theorize on justice, one needs to parenthesize the moral imagery of forgiveness and bring thirdness (or plurality) to the fore as the space where the identities of “victims” and “perpetrators” are established and played out.     

Shajaó—Histories of an Invented Savage

Through multiple stories about Shajaó, an untold history of the Peruvian Amazon unfolds. This article, based on extensive archival research and fieldwork, brings together multivocal accounts about an Ese Eja man who allegedly killed a Catholic priest in 1932 and who, despite the large-scale expeditions sent out to capture him, was not apprehended until 1942. Through ongoing tales of Shajaó, the intersubjective ways in which memory is shaped and employed to influence and make sense of sociopoltical contexts is revealed in the exchanges between a notable “savage” and various economies in different historical settings—the rubber boom, extractivism upheld by debt-peonage, Catholic missionization and today's environmental service economy. This exploration questions the construction, reproduction and transformation of the multiple, though not always shared, experiential and interpretive frameworks that shape the historical consciousness of individual and collective memories over time. It also suggests that “disremembering”, in archival and oral accounts, reflects a critical political awareness of history's valid flexibility. Here, narratives are rewoven so that history continues to be told in ways that ensure that “Shajaó stories” never truly end.     

Manufacturing Modernity: Cleaning,Dirt, and Neoliberalism in Chile

Since the coming to power in 1973 of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, neoliberalism in Chile has been discursively tied to the goal of “modernizing” Chilean society. This discourse of modernization has relied for its articulation upon another important discourse, that of “cleanliness” as a marker of progress: clean spaces are seen as those of modernity whereas dirty spaces are taken to represent social and economic “backwardness”. In this paper, then, we explore how spaces which are considered emblematic of the modern economy—shopping malls, giant office complexes, university campuses—are maintained as clean spaces. However, in order for the discourse of cleanliness as modernity to work, it is crucial that the corridors of mobility—train routes, subways, city streets—which allow passage between these nodes of the modern economy also be maintained as sanitary spaces. The result is the construction discursively of an almost seamless nexus of hygienic spaces, one which stands in contrast to the dirty spaces of the “other” Chile. The paradox in all of this, however, is that the workers who are crucial to this project—janitors—have suffered greatly as a result of neoliberalism.     

The Politics of Cognitive Dissonance: Spin,the Media,and Race (and Ethnicity) in the 2008 US Presidential Election

This article examines the roles of spin, the media, and race (and ethnicity) in influencing voter behavior in the 2008 US presidential election. It invokes the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how political strategists effectively propagandize – i.e., “reinvent their candidates” and “reinvent their opponents' actual record” – in order to successfully garner votes for their candidates. In particular, it considers spin and how spin and the media are used to shape public opinion by causing voters to distrust the veracity, credentials, and records of opposing candidates and to set the policy agenda. It also discusses how race, ethnicity, gender, and policy issues were used in the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and describes the impact of “spinning” on voter behavior and the election outcome. Equally important, it discusses the implications of the Obama victory for Canadian governance in two pivotal areas: domestic race relations and direct parliamentary representation of minorities. The article closes with a brief discussion of the symbolism attributed to Barack Obama's electoral victory by both American and Canadian voters.     

Books Received

This article is an analysis of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's short text “Kafka and His Precursors.” Although appearing to be an example of literary criticism, Borges's essay is in fact the exploration of a certain logical paradox. It is a paradox that is to be found throughout Borges's work, with the result that “Kafka and His Precursors” can be read as a disguised literary manifesto on the part of Borges. I also explore the consequences of Borges's essay for thinking about questions of cultural transmission. I argue that Borges’ work lives on—like those literary, religious and philosophical traditions he admires—because its most profound subject is the relationship it has with the person who reads it.     

“Playing the away game”: AFRICOM in the Sahara-Sahel

This article presents evidence to revise hypotheses of how biopolitical strategies are deployed in contemporary global security regimes, and with what effects. It is based on research into the US military's Africa Command (AFRICOM). Elaborating on two concepts that Michel Foucault hypothesized in his Security, Territory, Population lectures –the “people” and the “milieu” –I argue that AFRICOM's strategy is informed by biopolitical rationalities, but that this does not necessarily situate African populations as either part of a population to secure or as a threat to that population. Instead, I suggest that (unlike in the urban and national contexts that Foucault analyzed) biopolitical security strategies at the global scale are characterized by varying degrees of distance between the way(s) of life they aim to defend and what Foucault termed the “field of intervention” or “milieu” that they target. This hypothesis, and its elaboration through the case of AFRICOM, contributes to efforts to historicize and spatialize accounts of contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, it suggests that we can better understand the production of very uneven geographies of security and insecurity by attending to the relationships between the ways of life being secured and the (potentially distant) material contexts situated as relevant “fields of intervention”.     

Camouflaging Consumption and Colonial Mimicry: The Materiality of an Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Household

This article serves as an interpretation of Nipmuc history in colonial contexts by focusing on the engagement and survival of the “capitalist colonial” world by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nipmuc inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site in Grafton, Massachusetts. Ceramic analyses are drawn upon to argue that active consumer strategies and/or choices may potentially undermine the material and discursive markers of difference linked to notions of domesticity, class and race. The apparent homogenized or “insignificant” character of the Sarah Boston Farmstead ceramic assemblage is argued to in fact be quite significant, as its banality speaks to a degree of knowledgeable “mimicry”—tactical or not—that may have deflected (but not negated) inequality through the undermining of markers and discourses of difference.     

Tolerated,but not Preferred: Troubling the Unconscious of Televisual Multiculturalism

Canadian televisual exports make up at least 30 percent of the original content on US cable television. And from many angles, Canadian youth-television series look more diverse, more positive, and more attentive to interracial and interethnic issues than do similar US series. This article explores Canadian representations of interracial relationships and situates them within readings of Canada's official multicultural policy. It argues that much of this surface-level positivism about race reveals unconscious anxieties that ultimately manifest in drastic ways of treating “diversity” or “multicultural” subjects.     

Spiritual Warfare in Machiavelli's Prince

Machiavelli uses metaphors to convey meaning beyond the surface of his text. Access to his metaphors often begins via his “mistakes,” such as his calling (in chapter 12 of the Prince) Philip II of Macedon a “mercenary,” when in fact Philip was no such thing. This article focuses on chapters 12–14 of The Prince and explores the metaphoric meanings of Machiavelli's four types of soldiers—mercenary, auxiliary, mixed, and one's own—to explicate Machiavelli's account of how the mind of the West was conquered via “spiritual warfare.” It then explains Machiavelli's strategy for re-conquest by a new spiritual army trained by Machiavelli that will fight to defeat the regnant spiritual power and further Machiavelli's new principles.     

APHASIA,HISTORY, AND DURESS

This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of “colonial aphasia” in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands and Britain as well as using the notion to periodize. Those who came to aphasia before and without Stoler are also present here, and their contributions suggest a range of ways to think through radical, countercultural, and philosophical thought. That Gilles Deleuze and Paolo Virno use aphasia in contrary ways suggests that once aphasia departs from clinical settings, its poetics are rather up for grabs even if contained within activist gestures; both rethink matters of politics, dissent, and language. The example of Kurt Goldstein is also imported to show that clinical aphasia may go with the “detours” of patients, those stricken by war, catastrophe, and these peculiar speech disorders. That “detour” is also a Deleuzian word opens wide a “minor” register to history, speech, and forms of oppression. The semantic spectrum for aphasia in histories of politics and language is wide, from Stoler's colonial version that applies most to the privileged, to Deleuze's poetic transpositions that propose aphasia as an accomplishment, a rebellious refusal of communication. Aphasia has much promise as a historical category in and outside of colonial forms of duress.     

Hendrik de Man and Attila József: On Soft and Hard Conditions of Socialism

This article compares Hendrik de Man's (1885–1953) neo-Marxist approach with that of the Hungarian poet Attila József (1905–37). It suggests that de Man's “refinement” of Marxism amounts to foregrounding psychological aspects; he tends to replace “hard,” political or economic elements of Marxist and neo-Marxist theories with “soft,” psychological elements. For him Intellectual Socialism stands in opposition to Labor Socialism. This view may have challenged the synthesis-makers, including József, who sees himself as a “proletarian poet”: in his poetry he formulates the optimal relationship between the new intelligentsia and the proletariat, addressing the philosophical dilemmas raised by de Man. Whereas for de Man, Marx and philosophical Marxism are both of the past, demanding a mechanical interpretation, for József, Marxism—approached with no intention at revision—is a valid theory that calls for certain adjustments. His aspiration, even if unintended, is a correction and criticism of de Man's superficial categorization. Whereas de Man finds in Marxism the deterministic logic of eighteenth-century natural science, which analogy justifies its psychological refinement, for József the notion of law is always bound to society and history.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF EQUALITY

This article discusses the history of equality and recent efforts to write that history in the context of a detailed discussion of Siep Stuurman's The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. It begins by pointing out the surprising paucity of writing on the history of equality, particularly its conceptual and intellectual history, despite that notion's centrality in modern political and philosophical discussion. It proceeds to examine recent efforts to make amends for that lack. What Pierre Rosanvallon has described as the contemporary “crisis of equality” gives urgency to these efforts, while also, it is suggested, providing an opportunity to more fully explore the contingencies and complexities of this beguiling notion. Stuurman's examination of the invention and deployment of “cross‐cultural equality”—the basic equality of all people living in the world, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, or race—is an important step in this exploration. But as Samuel Moyn has emphasized in his own recent intervention on the history of social rights in an unequal world, it is not, on its own, enough. Future efforts to write the history of equality must integrate the social and economic dimensions of the idea more fully in an effort to better understand our contemporary dilemma.     

What More Is There to Say? Revisiting Agamben's Depiction of Homo Sacer

This article argues that Agamben's “paradigmatic method” leads to particular choices in his depiction of the figure of the homo sacer. Reviewing this project also suggests that there's more to history—the example given is the story of homo sacer—than Agamben's method would ever leave us to say. In other words, there are still resources in the tradition for something new, and thus there is much more left to say about its legacies.