Category Archives: academic

The Black Radical Tradition form Toussaint to Biko and Beyond – 1791: Haiti; 1958: Ghana; 1968: USA; 1968: Grahamstown; 1987 Burkina Faso

The Black Radical Tradition form Toussaint to Biko and Beyond – 1791: Haiti; 1958: Ghana; 1968: USA; 1968: Grahamstown; 1987 Burkina Faso

A Colloquium, 2, 3, & 4 July 2017

The colloquium will be held in Grahamstown during the National Arts Festival. It is co-hosted by the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU) and the Steve Biko Foundation (SBF). In preparation for the meeting participants are asked to familiarise themselves with Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism.

All events will be he held in the Humanities Seminar Room, 1 Prince Alfred Street.

Sunday 2 July – Day One

All delegates arrive in the afternoon.

Opening Keynote

5:00 – 6:30 Victoria Collis-Buthelezi – Mapping the Black World from South Africa

 Chair: Richard Pithouse Continue reading →

Lefèbvre and the periphery: an interview with professor Marie Huchzermeyer

This interview provides a short introduction to some relevant but usually dismissed debates regarding the relationship between Lefèbvre’s oeuvre and peripheral/semi-peripheral regions of the world. By talking about some parallels between South African and Brazilian uses of Lefèbvrian concepts, on the one hand, and about Lefèbvre’s use of the reality of Latin American favelas to develop his own concepts, Professor Marie Huchzermeyer proposes challenges to the established scholar Anglophone view on the role of legal rights in the quest for the ‘right to city’. She alternatively points towards a bottom-up reading of the ‘right to the city’ that goes beyond the famous ‘far and cry’ claim, highlighting the importance of institutional advancements as a means within the Lefèbvrian framework for social change.

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Lefèbvre and the periphery: an interview with Marie Huchzermeyer

The languages of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa: Reviewing migrancy, foreignness, and solidarity

The languages of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa: Reviewing migrancy, foreignness, and solidarity

by Camalita Naicker, Agenda: Feminist Magazine

This open forum piece argues that the language and discourse of xenophobia is a shared experience among people who are seen and constructed as being from ‘elsewhere’ in four different provinces in South Africa. It suggests that use of xenophobic discourse and language, the precarious nature of living conditions, labour conditions and restricted access to citizenship rights from the State, are experienced by all people who are categorised as ‘migrants’
internally, and those described as ‘foreigners’ or ‘refugees’ by Government officials.

What this open forum piece will also show is that the Pan-Africanism and collective ideas of freedom, struggle and resistance or ‘bonds of solidarity’ among migrant labourers, both from other countries as well as the former Bantustans during the struggles against apartheid, should not be confined to a nostalgic past, but seen as very much present in South Africa today. This solidarity is perhaps not so much about a shared history of struggle against colonialism and apartheid, although this too may be extant, but is rather informed by a shared present
where some are seen as citizens with freedom of movement and access to services from the State, while others are excluded. The notion of citizenship, then, becomes refracted, not merely through the making of the new categories of ‘foreigners’ through labour migration, but also through deeply raced and classed discourses which inform who is viewed as a migrant and who is not.

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The Languages of Xenophobia

Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

Michael Neocosmos

It should be apparent to all that violent approaches to resolving popular contradictions are today (again) seemingly all-pervasive on the African continent. The patent inability of the (new democratic) African state to resolve popular contradictions has led to more or less vocal calls for ‘foreign help’, with consequences which are often too ghastly to contemplate. It is not simply here a question of state deployed violence but also of popular violence (e.g. of an ethnic or xenophobic kind). In South Africa at least a ‘culture of violence’ has been systemically produced by specific forms of political thought and practice and not simply inherited from a colonial/apartheid past. In Nigeria the state’s insistence on addressing the Boko Haram phenomenon militarily has (predictably) completely backfired leading to the kidnapping of teenage children à la (originally Ugandan) Lords’ Resistance Army. The only popular response on offer seems to be a moral one: ‘free our girls’. The absence of alternative politics should be evident. This paper attempts to think a political alternative to violence founded upon concepts and categories inherent in African traditions; i.e. in in actually existing (although often subterranean) popular practices. These cannot be understood as mere survivals but have been imaginatively altered and reconstructed to different extents and in different ways because of the necessity of people to cope with ongoing crises in their lives from the slave trade onwards. The paper then is fundamentally conceptual and methodological in order to redirect analyses and to begin to make alternatives thinkable.

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Thinking an African Politics of Peace in an Era of Increasing Violence

The Marikana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, in 2013 and 2014: A site where neither the state, the party nor popular resistance is fully in charge

by Richard Pithouse

This chapter provides an account of some of the contestation around a landoccupation in Cato Manor, Durban. It shows that none of the actors aspiring toexercise control – party structures, the local state, the courts, NGOs and popularorganisations – were, in the period under study, able to exercise full control over thepeople or territory in question. It also shows that actually existing forms of contestationfrequently operated outside the limits established by liberal democratic arrangements

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The Marikana Land Occupation in Cato Manor