Category Archives: Interface

The pedagogy of road blockades

Road blockades have long since been a tool of struggle, and in recent months have featured in protests in South Africa, Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria, Palestine, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, Turkey, and probably in most other countries in the world. Whilst some road blockades might be considered spontaneous eruptions of anger, with little reflective thought involved, others are clearly part of conscious praxis, a tactic reflecting Gramsci’s ‘war of manoeuvre’. However, I argue, road blockades are also used as a counter-hegemonic pedagogical tool in a ‘war of position’, as one of the associated pedagogies within the “multi-faceted praxis and political strategy” of Subaltern Social Movements (Kapoor, 2011). The article uses two such movements, Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, and the piqueteros in Argentina, to explore this claim.

Dis/placing political illiteracy: the politics of intellectual equality in a South African shack-dwellers’ movement

Anna Selmeczi, Interface

This paper starts out with the claim that the contemporary spatio-political order of the South African “world class” city is conditional upon constructing many lives as superfluous and disposable. This construction partly rests on the inherited topography of apartheid displacement which continues to push the poor black majority into zones of invisibility and inaudibility. Beyond this physical distancing, the production and abandonment of surplus people also depends on rendering them as improper political subjects. In the prevailing political discourse, poor people’s struggles are deemed less than political through notions such as the idea that all protest is related to the pace of “service delivery” or accusations of violence, as well as often explicit characterizations of dissenting people as ignorant. Such discursive moves imply and reinforce a conception of the poor black majority as unable to think and practice their own politics; that is, as a politically illiterate group of people.

Continue reading →

Attachments

Dis/placing political illiteracy

Knowledge practices in Abahlali baseMjondolo

Gerard Gill, Interface

Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) are a South African shack dwellers’ movement that struggles for land, housing, basic services and the dignity of the poor. This article explores the movement’s ideology and knowledge practices. It then relates these to broader ideas in the activist and academic world in order to suggest what these knowledge practices might contribute to that world. AbM is based around a ‘living politics’ – a politics based on the concrete experiences of the people in the movement. As such, the movement does not subscribe to any outside model or ideology, it has its own. ‘Abahlalism’ is described as a new concept to form a new ideology for the movement. It draws some of its ideas from the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. The relationship between community and individual described in Ubuntu and the living politics of the movement greatly influence its structure and activities. While emphasis is placed on concrete lived experience, I argue that as similar ideas can be found elsewhere in social movement practices and literature, some of the lessons of the movement are broadly applicable to social movement struggles and research practices in regards to them.

Attachments

Knowledge practices in Abahlali baseMjondolo

Professors of our own poverty: intellectual practices of a poor people’s movement in post-apartheid South Africa

Cerianne Robertson, Interface

This paper addresses how a poor people’s movement contests dominant portrayals of ‘the poor’ as a violent mass in contemporary South African public discourse. To explore how Abahlali baseMjondolo, a leading poor people’s movement, articulates its own representation of ‘the poor,’ I examine two primary intellectual and pedagogical practices identified by movement members: first, discussion sessions in which members reflect on their experiences of mobilizing as Abahlali, and second, the website through which the movement archives a library of its own homegrown knowledge. I argue that these intellectual practices open new spaces for the poor to represent themselves to movement members and to publics beyond shack settlements. Through these spaces, Abahlali demonstrates and asserts the intelligence which exists in the shack settlements, and demands that its publics rethink dominant portrayals of ‘the poor.’

Attachments

Professors of our own poverty: intellectual practices of a poor people’s movement in post-apartheid South Africa

Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

Leave a reply

http://www.interfacejournal.net/2011/12/interface-volume-3-issue-2-feminism-womens-movements-and-women-in-movement/

Transition, human rights and violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Interface, 2011

Rather than seeing the prevalence of systemic political violence in Africa as resulting from a purportedly difficult “transition to democracy”, this article insists that accounts of such violence must be sought within the modes of rule of the democratic state itself. In particular, the manifestation of a contradiction between democracy and nationalism in a neo-colonial context, takes many different forms which cannot be resolved consensually given existing modes of rule and the enrichment of the oligarchy at the expense of the nation. Xenophobic violence in South Africa is used to illustrate the argument. It is shown that a distinction between domains of politics (including modes of rule) must be drawn. In particular, this means distinguishing between a domain of “civil society” and one of “uncivil society”. It is within the latter that most people relate and respond to state power. Within that domain, the state does not rule people as citizens with legally enforceable rights, but simply as a population with various entitlements. In this domain, violent political practices by the state tend to be the norm rather than the exception, so that violence acquires a certain amount of legitimacy for resolving contradictions among people. The overcoming of systemic violence (itself a political choice) can only begin to be conceived via a different thought of politics as subjective practice.

Click here to see this article on the Interface site or here to download it in pdf.