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"Johannesburg (South Africa) Social conditions."
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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
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
Melancholia of freedom
The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after.
Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.
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
Taming the Disorderly City
In postapartheid Johannesburg, tensions of race and class manifest themselves starkly in struggles over \"rights to the city.\" Real-estate developers and the very poor fight for control of space as the municipal administration steps aside, almost powerless to shape the direction of change. Having ceded control of development to the private sector, the Johannesburg city government has all but abandoned residential planning to the unpredictability of market forces. This failure to plan for the civic good-and the resulting confusion-is a perfect example of the entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance that are sweeping much of the Global South as well as the cities of the North.
Martin J. Murray brings together a wide range of urban theory and local knowledge to draw a nuanced portrait of contemporary Johannesburg. In Taming the Disorderly City, he provides a focused intellectual and political critique of the often-ambivalent urban dynamics that have emerged after the end of apartheid. Exploring the behaviors of the rich and poor, each empowered in their own way, as they rebuild a new Johannesburg, we see the entrepreneurial city: high-rises, shopping districts, and gated communities surrounded by and intermingled with poverty. In graceful prose, Murray offers a compelling portrait of the everyday lives of the urban poor as seen through the lens of real-estate capitalism and revitalization efforts.
eBook