The everyday experience of xenophobia: performing The Crossing from Zimbabwe to South Africa

Debates on the underlying causes of xenophobia in South Africa have proliferated since the attacks -between March and May 2008. Our article shows how exploring the everyday 'ordinariness' of xenophobia as performance can contribute additional insights not readily available in the public media or in works such as the recently published Go home or die here.- violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference (Hassim et al. 2009). The claim that as metaphor the meaning of performance is discovered in the dialectic established between the fictitious and actual context, provides a point of departure for a discussion of an autobiographical one-man play, The Crossing, in which Jonathan Nkala performs .his hazardous and 'illegal' rites of passage from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The play's aesthetic of 'witnessing', associated with the protest generation, intersects with and looks beyond a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) aesthetic. To contextualise our discussion of Nkala's work we track trends in responses to xenophobia, including the suggestion that the attacks were underpinned by prevailing discourses of exceptianaJism and indigeneity. However, the intimacy of targeting those living close to you needs fuller anatysis. We will argue that the liminality of the performance event provides scope for making connections not directly 'there' at the moment of performance. This has a bearing on the 'return' to Fanon and claims about 'negrophobia' characterising many reports in the public domain on the events of 2008. In turn, this invites speculation about the re-alignments indicated here.DHE

Retrieving Biko: a black consciousness critique of whiteness

There is an important history often neglected by genealogies of ‘critical whiteness studies’: Steve Biko's Black Consciousness critique of white liberalism. What would it mean to retrieve this criticism in the context of white anti-racism in the post-apartheid era? Said's (2003) contrapuntal method proves useful here as a juxtaposing device whereby the writings of a past figure can be critically harnessed, travelling across temporal and ideological boundaries to interrogate the present. Four interlinked modes of disingenuous white anti-racism can thus be identified: (1) a fetishistic preoccupation with disproving one's racism; (2) ostentatious forms of anti-racism that function as means of self-promotion, as paradoxical means of white self-love; (3) the consolidation and extension of agency through redemptive gestures of ‘heroic white anti-racism’; (4) ‘charitable anti-racism’ which fixes tolerance within a model of charity, as an act of generosity and that reiterates the status and role of an anti-racist benefactor

A terra e seus vários sentidos: por uma sociologia e etnologia dos moradores de fazenda na África do Sul contemporânea

Este texto é resultado de pesquisas realizadas com o Landless People's Movement, na África do Sul, e tem como tema a relação histórica estabelecida entre os trabalhadores rurais moradores de fazendas de brancos (denominados farm dwellers, em inglês, ou abahlali basimapulazini, em Zulu) e as terras em que vivem. A partir de dados bibliográficos, fontes documentais e pesquisa de campo, defendemos a hipótese de que essas pessoas compõem uma categoria fluida, do ponto de vista das políticas de restituição, de reforma e de direito à terra. Tratar-se-ia de uma categoria em que estariam entremeadas as consequências do apartheid, as transformações na agricultura, as religiões e as leis costumeiras. Trama e fluidez que constituem um problema para antropólogos e sociólogos que se aventuram a lidar com a questão, assim como para os próprios movimentos e ONGs que a representam. Tanto do ângulo das políticas, como dos textos de ciências sociais, esses trabalhadores encarnariam os dilemas de não serem vistos nem como suficientemente modernos, tampouco como tradicionais a ponto de garantirem status teórico no escaninho dos estudos sobre o campesinato e trabalhadores rurais ou no da Etnologia africana clássica<br>This paper presents the results of a composition of literature review and field research on the Landless People's Movement struggles in South Africa aiming to explore the historical relation between the farm dwellers and the land they live's claim. Drawing from fieldwork notes, archives and literature debates, I state that the fluidity of this category, that embraces consequences of the apartheid, transformations in the agricultural sector, religion and customary laws affects their relations with the State, social movements and NGOs. This complexity also becomes problematic due to the fact that they cannot be easily described by the traditional sociological narratives designed for farm workers, peasants and neither with the one's of the classical African ethnology