South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era

·
· Routledge
Ebook
166
Pages
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

This book explores what happened to the homelands – in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace – after the fall of apartheid. The nine chapters contribute to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) – between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation – are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test. As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

About the author

Steffen Jensen is a Professor at the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University and a Senior Researcher at DIGNITY: The Danish Institute Against Torture. He has published on issues of gangs, policing, justice, human rights, development and victimhood in South Africa and the Philippines. He has recently published Histories of Victimhood (2014) and Human Rights and State Violence: State officials in the South (2009).

Olaf Zenker

is a Junior Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. He has published on modern statehood, rule of law, bureaucracy, justice, land reform as well as conflict and identity formations in South Africa and Northern Ireland. He recently published Irish/ness is all around us (2013).

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.