Border dialogues : race, class and space in the industrialization of East London, c1902-1963

Bibliography: pages 361-389.This dissertation explores the local path of industrialization in the port City of East London from its emergence as the urban commercial axis of the Border Region of the Eastern Cape, to the dominance of manufacturing capitalism in its material life. The trajectory of this process between c1902 and 1963 was hesitant, uneven and contradictory, and its local economy remained marginal within South Africa, if not within the Region it critically served to help define. From the space of this marginality, a profound edge on the multiple possible routes, and ambiguities to, and in industrialization are demonstrated, and a cautionary critique of dominant 'national' and 'Randcentric' explanations offered. Employing concerns of spatiality, and of the analysis and local constructions of class and race, the separate, and inter-connected relations between the Workplaces, the Council and Municipal Administration and the Location/s are detailed. Framed within these concerns, local industrialization patterned a distinctive periodization that did not necessarily follow existing explanation, but neither did it determine alIloca1ized processes of continuity and change. These tensions between colonial, racial and class social and material spatialities and histories sedimented industrialization in a context that would remain simultaneously narrowly enabled, and dependently constrained. In this, local forms of power and knowledge, subaltern capacities and agency, and the distinct forms of space intersected in a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, and of solidarity and co-operation. These are traced through the four key periods highlighted. The dissertation can be seen to fall into these four periods tracked across the three material and social terrains, and analysed through the combined, separate and uneven racial and class forces patterned, and re-shaped in East London's process of industrialization. It concludes with the period of its transition onto the national terrains of the apartheid state's secondary phase of systemic and inclusive restructuring. Thereafter, local industrialization became integrated into a new 'national' dynamic of intervention and contradiction

The Fighting Port: capital accumulation, working class struggle and the making of apartheid, 1946 - 1963

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 199

Sir Harry Smith and his imbongi: local and national identities in the Eastern Cape, 1952

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Reaping the whirlwind: the East London riots

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 199

Remains of the Social

Remains of the Social is an interdisciplinary volume of essays that engages with what ‘the social’ might mean after apartheid; a condition referred to as ‘the post-apartheid social’. The volume grapples with apartheid as a global phenomenon that extends beyond the borders of South Africa between 1948 and 1994 and foregrounds the tension between the weight of lived experience that was and is apartheid, the structures that condition that experience and a desire for a ‘post-apartheid social’ (think unity through difference). Collectively, the contributors argue for a recognition of the ‘the post-apartheid’ as a condition that names the labour of coming to terms with the ordering principles that apartheid both set in place and foreclosed. The volume seeks to provide a sense of the terrain on which ‘the post-apartheid’ - as a desire for a difference that is not apartheid’s difference - unfolds, falters and is worked through

Red assembly: The work remains

The work that emerged from the encounter with Red, an art installation by Simon Gush and his collaborators, in the workshop ‘Red Assembly’, held in East London in August 2015, is assembled here in Kronos, the journal of southern African histories based at the University of the Western Cape, and previously in parallax, the cultural studies journal based at the University of Leeds published in May 2016. What is presented there and here is not simply more work, work that follows, or even additional works. Rather, it is the work that arises as a response to a question that structured our entire project: does Red, now also installed in these two journals, have the potential to call the discourse of history into question? This article responds to this question through several pairings: theft – gift; copy – rights; time – history; kronos – chronos. Here we identify a reversal in this installation of the gift into the commodity, and another with regard to conventional historical narratives which privilege the search for sources and origins. A difference between (the historian’s search for) origination and (the artist’s) originality becomes visible in a conversation between and over the historic and the artistic that does not simply try to rescue History by means of the work of art. It is in this sense that we invite the displacements, detours, and paths made possible through Simon Gush’s Red, the ‘Red Assembly’ workshop and the work/ gift of installation and parallaxing. To gesture beyond ‘histories’ is the provocation to which art is neither cause nor effect. Thinking with the work of art, that is, grasping thought in the working of art, has extended the sense of history’s limit and the way the limit of history is installed. What to do at this limit, at the transgressive encounter between saying yes and no to history, remains the challenge. It is the very challenge of what insistently remains.DHE

With shouts of Afrika!’: The 1952 textile strike at good hope textiles, King William's town

* Financial support from the Human Sciences Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. It is not, of course, to be held responsible for the opinions expressed or the conclusions reached.This paper, through a detailed examination of one of the biggest and most significant strikes in the East London region, suggests its importance lies both in the events and processes of the strike itself, and in its longer term impact on political traditions of union and popular struggle. It argues that a dynamic relationship developed between a newly emergent industrial working class in the textile industry, and an equally rapidly established local ATWIU, and local ANC branch. This resulted in the merging of a pattern of worker discontent and strike action with the ANCs Defiance Campaign in particular, and in so doing, the nature and direction of the strike was transformed. Finally it is argued that the defeat of this ‘mass’ strike of defiance by the textile workers, laid the patterns and built the disillusions of future labour struggles in the region. © 1990 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.Human Sciences Research Counci

Re-imaging the Eastern Cape Province: Sustainable Human Development from the Perspectives of the State, Civic Society, and the University

The Eastern Cape Planning Commission identifies human development as the central concern that the Provincial Development Plan should be premised on (Eastern Cape Planning Commission, 2012). This article proposes to critically examine the emerging (albeit implicit) philosophicalfoundation for sustainable human development, which we read as a combination of consciousness, capability, and rational organisation, and discusses these three interrelating aspects against selected stakeholders of sustainable human development: the State, civic society and the university. We determine that a re-imagination of the Eastern Cape Province would require serious consideration for the reshaping of the State, a rethinking of the roles and relationships with, and between, civic society, and a review of the third mission of the university

Listening to Red

Following a distinction John Mowitt draws between hearing (and phonics), and listening (and sonics), this article argues that the dominant notion of listening to sound was determined by the disciplinary framework of South African history and by the deployment of a cinematic documentary apparatus, both of which have served to disable the act of listening. The conditions of this hearing, and a deafness to a reduced or bracketed listening (Chion via Schaeffer) that would enable us to think the post in post-apartheid differently, is thus at the centre of our concerns here. We stage a series of screenings of expected possible soundtracks for Simon Gush's film and installation Red, simultaneously tracking the ways that sound - and particularly music and dialogue - can be shown to hold a certain way of thinking both the political history of South Africa and the politics of South African history. We conclude by listening more closely to hiss and murmur in the soundtrack to Red and suggest this has major implications for considering ways of thinking and knowing