Constructing Solidarities for a Humane Urbanism

Anti-Eviction Movements towards Overcoming Racial Capitalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This module explores how the ideological and insurgent practices of a localized anti-eviction movement disrupt the City of Cape Town’s post-apartheid strategies governing its marginalized metropolitan periphery. It focuses on how the movement’s insistence on grounding claims for decent housing in experiences of collective suffering and struggles for dignified livelihoods—rather than in individualized, universal and liberal legal rights—exposes and challenges the systemic racial capitalism underpinning persistent white wealth, property, and privilege.  
Their rejection of the colonial-apartheid era racialized categorizations reproduced by the post-apartheid state in favor of building on a sense of shared struggles to create communal territories offers normative foundations for a possible social cohesion and unity capable of redressing historical injustices of racialized dispossession, oppression, and economic exploitation.     

Reading Suggestions

Amin, Samir. (1990). The Social Movements in the Periphery: An End to National liberation. In Samir Amin, Giovani Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution. MR Press. 

Cloete, Michael (2014). Neville Alexander: Towards overcoming the legacy of racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. Transformation Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 86, 30-47.

Gibson, N. (2011). Fanonian Practices in South Africa. UKZN Press.

Gillespie, Kelly. (2010). Reclaiming Nonracialism: reading The Threat of Race from South Africa. Patterns of Prejudice, 44:1, 61-75.

Hallward, P. (2007). Damming the Flood. London: Verso.

Harvey, David. (2006). Spaces of Global Capitalism; Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Verso.

Harvey, David. (2001). Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge.

Hoogevelt, Ankie. (1997). Globalization and the Postcolonial World; the new political economy of development. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lentin, Alana. (2011). What Happens to Anti-Racism when we are Post Race? Feminist Legal Studies, 19, 159–16.

Merrifield, Andy. (2014). The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Pithouse, Richard. (2015). Undoing the silence of the present: the imperative to recognize the shack settlement as a site of politics. In C.Haferburg and M. Huchzermeyer, Urban Governance in Post-Apartheid Cities: Modes of Engagement in South Africa’s Metropoles. UKZN Press.    

Robinson, CJ. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of The Black Radical Tradition. London: Verso.

Roy, A. (2011). Slumdog Cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35, 223-238.

Roy, A. (2017). Dis/possessive collectivism Property and Personhood. Geoforum 80, A1-A11.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global Street: Making of the Political, Globalizations, 8(5), 573-579.

Sivanandam, A. (1990). Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. Verso: London.

Waquant, Loic. (2008). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Polity Press.

Zibechi, R. (2012). Territories in Resistance. Oakland: AK Press.

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