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"Johannesburg, South Africa"
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At Home with Apartheid
Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid's most repressive years. InAt Home with Apartheid,Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg's middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960-1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family.
More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power.
Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers' detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg's suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas.
The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book's strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.
eBook
Uniting a Divided City
For many, Johannesburg resembles the imagined spectre of the urban future. Global anxieties about catastrophic urban explosion, social fracture, environmental degradation, escalating crime and violence, and rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty, are projected onto this city as a microcosm of things to come. Decision-makers in cities worldwide have attempted to balance harsh fiscal and administrative realities with growing demands for political, economic and social justice. This book investigates pragmatic approaches to urban economic development, service delivery, spatial restructuring, environmental sustainability and institutional reform in Johannesburg. It explores the conditions and processes that are determining the city's transformation into a cosmopolitan metropole and magnet for the continent.
eBook
Fractured Militancy
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and
interviews with activists, Fractured
Militancy tells the story of postapartheid
South Africa from the perspective of Johannesburg's impoverished
urban Black neighborhoods. Nearly three decades after
South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, widespread
protests and xenophobic attacks suggest that not all is well in the
once-celebrated \"rainbow nation.\"
Marcel Paret traces rising protests back to the process of
democratization and racial inclusion. This process dangled the
possibility of change but preserved racial inequality and economic
insecurity, prompting residents to use militant protests to express
their deep sense of betrayal and to demand recognition and
community development. Underscoring remarkable parallels to
movements such as Black Lives Matter in the United States, this
account attests to an ongoing struggle for Black liberation in the
wake of formal racial inclusion.
Rather than unified resistance, however, class struggles within
the process of racial inclusion produced a fractured militancy.
Revealing the complicated truth behind the celebrated \"success\" of
South African democratization, Paret uncovers a society divided by
wealth, urban geography, nationality, employment, and political
views. Fractured Militancy warns of the threat that
capitalism and elite class struggles present to social movements
and racial justice everywhere.
eBook
Migrant women of Johannesburg : everyday life in an in-between city
Through rich stories of African migrant women in Johannesburg, this book explores the experience of living between geographies. Author Caroline Kihato draws on fieldwork and analysis to examine the everyday lives of those inhabiting a fluid location between multiple worlds, suspended between their original home and an imagined future elsewhere.
eBook
Ubuntu, migration and ministry : being human in a Johannesburg church
In Ubuntu, Migration and Ministry Elina Hankela engages with the socio-moral meanings of ubuntu (Nguni: humanness/humanity) in contemporary Johannesburg drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Central Methodist Mission, a Johannesburg inner-city church that has been re-shaped in the face of international migration.
eBook