Overview

On 11 May 2008, residents of Alexandra Township turned violently on their neighbours, launching a string of attacks that, two weeks later, left 60 dead, dozens raped and over a hundred thousand displaced. This book situates recent anti-outsider violence within an extended history of South African statecraft that both produced the conditions for the attacks and has been reshaped by it. It is the first academic text to fully theorise the events that made global headlines in 2008. Through its subtle, empirical and theoretically informed analysis, the book reshapes discussion of xenophobia and violence in South Africa while injecting local debates into global considerations of the meaning of citizenship and the post-colonial state.

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9789280812152

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Reviews

By placing the demons within both migration and violent citizenship and in a longer historical perspective, this book succeeds in surpassing current interpretations of the 2008 violence against immigrants in the townships as just resulting from xenophobia. The authors masterfully show that the politics of statecraft - notably the African National Congress' (ANC) language of multicultu ral dominance - inspired a fatal depolitisation of difference. The very coherence of this collection offers a challenging analysis of struggle over belonging and denial of difference that is of much broader relevance than South Africa alone. - Peter Geschiere, Department of African Anthropology, University of Amsterdam - This book is critical of the policies, practices and politics of containment that continue to frame belonging in post-apartheid South Africa in an era of flexible mobility. The dominant logic of ever diminishing circles of inclusion informed by hierarchies of humanity within and between states is productive of the sort of narrow articulation of belonging that easily results in the rationalis ation of difference, demonisation, xenophobia and violence such as that of May 2008 - the key event that ties together this richly crafted, well documented and empiricall y grounded collection of essays. - Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town -

Author Information

Loren B. Landau is director of the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

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