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ID:
117769
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Using as its point of departure the claim that today the urban is the main site for the abandonment of superfluous people, this article explores the emancipatory politics of the South African shack-dwellers' movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Based on a notion of political subjectivization as the appropriation of excess freedom, I argue that Abahlali disrupt the order of the 'world-class city' when they expose the contradiction between the democratic inscriptions of equality and the lethal segmentation of the urban order. In articulating their living conditions as the unjustified breach of the promise of 'a better life', the shack-dwellers prove their equality and thus emerge as political subjects. As the article argues, at the centre of this process is a political practice of speaking and listening that is driven by the imperative to reverse the distancing and delaying practices of an order that abandons them by remaining physically, experientially and cognitively proximate to the experiences of life in the shantytown.
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| 2 |
ID:
139766
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| Summary/Abstract |
Motivated by the litigious politics of the South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, this paper enquires into the knowledge dynamics implied by the governmentality literature’s take on the (neo)liberal deployment of (human) rights. It suggests that by implicitly constructing the freedom of codified rights as illusionary and opposed to the reality of neoliberal rationalities of government, this scholarship posits a cognitive hierarchy between agents of government and the governed, and thus reproduces the power dynamics that it seeks to criticise. Interweaving a presentation of Abahlali’s self-articulation as knowledgeable and rightful subjects with Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘literariness’, the paper accounts for codified rights’ potential to enable the disruption of such dynamics, and traces the governmentality literature’s suspicion towards this potential back to its textual methodology.
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