Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City

by Yousuf Al-Bulushi

Overview

How are poor people in South Africa confronting the persistent legacy of apartheid spatial segregation and anti-blackness? And what can movements across the world engaged in a global struggle against racial capitalism learn from the South African experience? This book explores the relationship between shack dwellers and the municipal government in South Africa. Grounded in the local realities of the struggle for housing and basic survival, the project makes broader interventions in national, continental and global debates about urban geography, African studies, social movements and race. The author argues that the shack settlement is emblematic of a democratic South Africa still profoundly shaped by apartheid's afterlife.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031424328
Publisher:	Springer Nature Switzerland
Publication date:	03/30/2024
Series:	Contemporary African Political Economy
Edition description:	2024
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yousuf Al-Bulushi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking the World from Durban.- Ch 1 Transition: Fissures in the Time and Space of Democracy.- Ch 2 Ruptures: From Post-Politics to the Urban Political.- Ch 3 Development: A Promised Land Called Cornubia.- Ch 4 Precarity & Autonomy: Life & Death in the Shacks.- Ch 5 Poverty and Policy.- Conclusion: Dignity as Rupture: Alter-Globalization 2.0.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A city like Durban can be taken as a looking glass to think the world. This is the wager of this book. Focusing his research on Abahlali base Mjondolo, a prominent shack dweller organization, Al-Bulushi explores an amazing fabric of struggle and self-organization that resonates in other global landscapes and foreshadows the coming of a new age for the alter globalization movement. In the dire conjuncture we are living through, this book opens new vistas for a politics of liberation.” (Sandro Mezzadra, author of “In the Marxian Workshops”)

“Yousuf Al-Bulushi narrates an in-depth history and political geography of shack dweller struggles in Durban, South Africa, and provides a radical template for urban studies. Theoretically sophisticated and deeply researched, Ruptures will appeal to scholars across many academic fields, even while it remains accessible to the general reader. It is a remarkably absorbing and brilliant study.” (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian and author of “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”)

“Travelling with Al-Bulushi takes us beyond the surfaces of rhizomatic textures of the rainbow nation and its fake racial cohesion to systemic, structural, and institutional violence. Ruptures is an important contribution to both urban studies and African Studies, and indeed to deeper understandings of the operations of the modern world-system. I have nothing but praise for this erudite and elegantly delivered work which decolonizes our minds as it offers a devastating indictment of racial capitalism.” (Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of “Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism”)