This book examines how asbestos activists living in remote rural villages in South Africa activated metropolitan resources of representation at the grassroots level in a quest for justice and ...restitution for the catastrophic effects on their lives caused by the asbestos industry. It follows the Asbestos Interest Group (AIG) over a fifteen-year period through its involvement in grassroots research, in legal cases and in the compensation systems for asbestos-related disease. It examines how the AIG became grassroots technicians of translocal paperwork, moving texts back and forth between periphery and center, pushing documents through the textual mazeways of the courts, medical institutions, the compensation system and various government agencies. The book addresses rhetorical mobility and the extent to which, given the AIG's position on the periphery, it has been able to enter the voices and interests of villagers into formerly inaccessible forums of deliberation and decision-making.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960–1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's ...restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a religious constituency largely embraced the commission's religious-redemptive language of reconciliation, Wilson argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse. It ends on a call for more cautious and realistic expectations about what human rights institutions can achieve in democratizing countries.
After the transition to democracy in 1994, South Africa reached out to perpetrators of violence from all conflicting parties by giving amnesty to those who fully disclosed their politically motivated ...crimes. This 2007 volume provides a comprehensive analysis of South Africa's amnesty scheme in its practical and normative dimensions. Through empirical analysis of over 1000 amnesty decisions made by the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the study measures the scheme against its stated goals of truth recovery, victim empowerment and perpetrator accountability. It also explores normative questions raised by the absence of punishment. Highlighting the distinctive nature of South Africa's conditional amnesty as an exceptional 'rite of passage' into the new, post-conflict society, it argues that the amnesty scheme is best viewed as an attempt to construct a new 'justice script' for a society in transition, in which a legacy of politically motivated violence is being addressed.
Waste of a white skin Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany
2015., 20150106, 2015, 2015-01-06
eBook
A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century,Waste of a White ...Skinfocuses on the American Carnegie Corporation's study of race in South Africa, thePoor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought-black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition-to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people's presence in the economic system.Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.
The book is a rare case study of the dynamics, processes and shifts around the creation and reading of one of the world’s major monuments, through all the processes of its design and making. The ...frieze which represents the Great Trek and Voortrekker occupation of South Africa (1835-52) is one of the largest of its kind. The key question is how, a century later, were eighteen years of Voortrekker memory transformed into a 92-metre marble frieze?
This book critically investigates the flourishing monument phenomenon in post-apartheid South Africa, notably the political discourses that fuel it; its impact on identity formation, its potential ...benefits, and most importantly its ambivalences and contradictions.
Timothy Sisk presents a new way of conceiving the transition to democracy in South Africa. Unlike authors such as Horowitz and Lijphart, who have sought to prescribe an ideal set of post-apartheid ...political institutions, Sisk asks what kinds of institutions show signs of actually emerging, given recent history and present realities. He treats the problem of constructing a democratic post-apartheid society in South Africa as part of a larger condition common to societies deeply divided by ethnic, religious, racial, or national discord. Though its profound cleavages of race and class make it a "least likely" candidate for conflict resolution through democratization, Sisk argues that the centripetal pull on moderate politicians of all parties was greater than the seemingly natural polarizing trend in a divided society. This centripetal pull led to the adoption of an interim constitution in 1993 after protracted negotiations. An American Fulbright scholar sent to South Africa after the end of the 21-year rupture of official scholarly exchanges between the two countries, Sisk analyzes the changes in the strategic calculations of the white minority government, the black liberation movement, and other parties over the course of negotiations since 1990. He concludes that intermittent upsurges of violence often reinforced, rather than reduced, the incentives of leaders on both sides to negotiate a settlement that would avoid mutually damaging outcomes. Drawing on extensive interviews with political figures, as well as other primary and secondary sources, Sisk finds reason for hope that a democratic social contract can evolve, balancing majority rule with minority representation and guaranteeing equal economic opportunity and social justice.
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The events of May 2008 in which 62 people were killed simply for being eforeigni and thousands were turned overnight into refugees shook the South African nation. This book is the first to attempt a ...comprehensive and rigorous explanation for those horrific events. It argues that xenophobia should be understood as a political discourse and practice. As such its historical development as well as the conditions of its existence must be elucidated in terms of the practices and prescriptions which structure the field of politics. In South Africa, the history of xenophobia is intimately connected to the manner in which citizenship has been conceived and fought over during the past fifty years at least. Migrant labour was de-nationalised by the apartheid state, while African nationalism saw the same migrant labour as the foundation of that oppressive system. Only those who could show a family connection with the colonial and apartheid formation of South Africa could claim citizenship at liberation. Others were excluded and seen as unjustified claimants to national resources. Xenophobiais conditions of existence, the book argues, are to be found in the politics of post-apartheid nationalism where state prescriptions founded on indigeneity have been allowed to dominate uncontested in conditions of an overwhelmingly passive conception of citizenship. The de-politicisation of an urban population, which had been able to assert its agency during the 1980s through a discourse of human rights in particular, contributed to this passivity. Such state liberal politics have remained largely unchallenged. As in other cases of post-colonial transition in Africa, the hegemony of xenophobic discourse, the book contends, is to be sought in the specific character of the state consensus.
This incisive, deeply informed book introduces post-apartheid South Africa to an international audience. Despite calls to undermine the 1994 political settlement characterized by human rights ...guarantees and the rule of law, distinguished diplomat John Campbell argues that the country's future is bright and that its democratic institutions will weather its current lackluster governance.
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