Category Archives: Kerry Chance

Wits Seminar: “We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp Today” – Development Futures in Democratic South Africa

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa Invites you to a talk by Dr. Kerry Chance. ACLS New Faculty Fellow, Anthropology Department, Harvard University

“We Will Not Be Moving To Your Transit Camp Today”: Development Futures in Democratic South Africa

This talk examines shifting political meanings of housing evictions in democratic South Africa. Since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, townships and shack settlements – commemorated in liberation histories as heroic battlegrounds and shameful testaments to apartheid – have been recast in public discourse as ‘slums,’ zones of de facto criminality, earmarked for clearance or development. In recent years, residents have been moved en masse away from public spaces to ‘transit camps,’ the latest technology of slum elimination that is reshaping the urban periphery. Street protests against these evictions have been officially condemned and met with brutality by police and private security forces. While state agents justify evictions under a liberal logic of progressively realized rights and inclusive citizenship, residents see continuities with apartheid-era removals and new forms of exclusion at the intersections of race and class. I argue, by studying these interactions between residents and state agents, governmental modes of managing slum populations and relations of force become visible, and with them, emerging political practices of a collectively self-identified ‘poor.’

Date: July 30 2013

Time: 10-11am

Venue: Committee Room, CISA, 36 Jorissen Street

Padkos: The Occupation of Symphony Way

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PADKOS BIOSCOPE NO 4

Street Dreams: The Occupation of Symphony Way

We know some of our regulars were gutted they couldn’t make it – but thanks to everyone else for great support and discussions at the “Occupy Wall St” showing! Continuing the occupy theme, but locking it down in our own context, we’re watching “Street Dreams” next week: Thursday, 16 May 2013 at 1pm as usual at the padkos bioscope.

Produced by the Special Assignment team at the SABC, the 25-minute, 2009 documentary “Street Dreams” told key parts of the story of the militant occupation of Symphony Way in Delft, Cape Town. That area of Delft, Cape Town has been the scene of active militant occupation – and typically illegal and violent state response – at the settlement of Marikana. We have attached some outstanding reportage and analysis from Jared Sacks in 2 pieces from the Daily Maverick.

At the screening, CLP’s David Ntseng will give some background and an update. David has just returned from Cape Town where he managed to spend time with Abahlali baseMjondolo comrades involved in the occupation at Marikana. He had also spent time with the pavement occupiers of Symphony Way back in 2009. We’re also attaching Kerry Chance’s paper: “Housing and Evictions at the N2 Gateway Project in Delft”, written for Abahlali baseMjondolo in 2008. We’ll also have a few copies of the booklet that the Symphony Way comrades wrote about their struggle.

Mnikelo Ndababnkulu and Zodwa Nsibande Speak at ‘Dear Mandela’ Screening, Harvard University: 27 September 2012

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http://africa.harvard.edu/event/dear-mandela-screening/

“DEAR MANDELA” SCREENING

Event:“Dear Mandela” Screening
Start:September 27, 2012 12:00 pm
End:September 27, 2012 2:00 pm
Venue:Wasserstein Hall, Room B015
Address:1585 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States

The Committee on African Studies, along with the Du Bois Institute, the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, and the Political Anthropology Working Group are co-sponsoring a special screening event of award-winning documentary Dear Mandela. Dear Mandela captures a story of the first post-Apartheid generation, through the eyes of three ‘young lions’ who fight mass eviction from their shantytowns, an take their government to the highest court in the land, putting the promises of democracy to the test.

Filmmaker Dara Kell as well as Mnikelo Ndabankulu and Zodwa Nsibande from South African Shackdwellers’ Movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion, led by ACLS New Faculty Fellow Kerry Chance.

FILM SYNOPSIS

When the South African government promises to ‘eradicate the slums’ and begins evicting shack dwellers from their homes, three friends who live in Durban’s vast shantytowns refuse to be moved. DEAR MANDELA follows their journey from their shacks to the highest court in the land as they invoke Nelson Mandela’s example and become leaders in an inspiring social movement.

Mazwi, an enlightened schoolboy; Zama, an AIDS orphan and Mnikelo, a mischievous shopkeeper are part of a new generation who feel betrayed by the broken promises of Mandela’s own political party, the African National Congress. Determined to stop the evictions, they met with their communities by candlelight and discovered that the new innocuous-sounding ‘Slums Act’ legalized the evictions and violated the rights enshrined in the country’s landmark Constitution. With the help of pro bono lawyers, they challenged the Slums Act all the way to the hallowed Constitutional Court.

The extraordinary achievements of the shack dwellers did not come without a price. As the beloved Mandela’s portrait beams down from schoolroom chalkboards and shack walls, Mazwi, Zama and Mnikelo learn of the sacrifices that come with leadership. Shack demolitions, assassination attempts and government repression test their resolve to continue. By turns devastating, inspiring and funny, DEAR MANDELA offers a new perspective on the role that young people can play in political change and is a fascinating portrait of South Africa coming of age.

JWTC: Theory – north south and between

http://jhbwtc.blogspot.com/2012/07/theory-north-south-and-between.html

Theory – north south and between

Kerry Chance, from Harvard University, attended the 2012 Session of the JWTC. She speaks to The Blog.

What in your view distinguishes ‘theory’ from Harvard and ‘theory’ from Johannesburg?

As I understand it, the proposition of the Johannesburg Workshop, among other things, is to read and produce contemporary theory from ‘the South,’ and thereby also to make visible the potential parochialisms of ‘the North.’ Having lived and worked in South Africa for over a decade, my approach to theory has been profoundly shaped by life and thought emanating from here. As anthropologists and scholars of Post-colonial and African Studies have argued for some time, our vantage in the world has a bearing on the kinds of questions we ask of theory, and how we think theory vis-à-vis the Western canon. So, while it is important not to lose sight of this proposition, the lines between ‘North’ and ‘South’ often are not so easily drawn. With regard to recent housing evictions in Johannesburg and Chicago, for instance, we might see more connections between Soweto and Chicago’s Cabrini Green than Sandton or Chicago’s Northside. In other words, we should not overlook emerging global relations and processes that suggest how ‘North’ and ‘South’ can be seen as multiple and beyond any simple dichotomy. In this vein, having spent the last year at Harvard, I can say that it is a place where African Studies is being taken seriously. There also are many academics, students, research projects, initiatives and student organizations that are ‘thinking from the South’ in important ways. Continue reading →

UKZN Seminar: “Where There is Fire, There is Politics:” Ungovernability in Democratic South Africa

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Development Studies and Population Studies Seminar – note unusual day and time.
Title: “Where There is Fire, There is Politics:” Ungovernability in Democratic South Africa
Speaker: Kerry Chance (Social Anthropology at Harvard University)
Time: 14:00 – 15:30 (Tuesday) 24 July 2012.
Venue: Seminar Room F213, School of Built Environment and Development Studies, Memorial Tower Building, UKZN Google maps: -29.866933,30.981963

Abstract: This talk examines the political meanings of fire amongst residents of townships and shack settlements in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that fire – inside the home as a hazardous source of light and heat, or on the streets to signal revolt – expresses a grammar of everyday practices and interactions between residents and state officials. Where residents posit the state’s failure to provide formal housing and services as the cause of routine slum conflagrations and street protests, officials posit a new criminal type amongst ‘the poor.’ These practices and interactions have given rise to disputes in South African public discourse over the legitimate demarcation between crime and politics under liberal democratic conditions. Key words: politics; crime; nature; slums; sovereignty; violence; liberal democracy

Dr. Kerry Chance is a University of Chicago-trained anthropologist and currently a Visiting Faculty member and American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. She is a former Visiting Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Foundation, the Marcus Garvey Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the author of the forthcoming book Living Politics: Practices and Protests of ‘the Poor’ in Democratic South Africa, as well as other scholarly articles, news pieces and published interviews.