Critiquing prescriptions of place and belonging in neoliberal post-apartheid Cape Town: An ethnography on the politics of abjection in language, policy, and practice
Date
2022-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study speaks to politics of race, place, belonging, and of inherited conditions shaping prospects in the post-apartheid present. I consider abjection as it finds expression in urban development discourse and Cape Town’s aspiration to a world-class aesthetic, in media reports discussing homelessness, the rehabilitative interventions geared to address it, and in the material infrastructure and well-meaning rhetorics advanced in shelter contexts. Ethnographic fieldwork, for the most part, was conducted at The Haven Night Shelter in Bellville and the Safe Space, on the Foreshore in Cape Town. Proposing an intertextual approach grounded in material semiotics and inspired by literary and critical theory, I acknowledge the constituting power of discourse, the ideologies and rhetorics inscribed in material things, and the political and social life of infrastructures. I take participants’ perspectives seriously and foreground the experiences of the people towards whom rehabilitative interventions and infrastructures of care are geared. In their aspirations to home and place in spaces not prescribed for them, and in their intimate relations with infrastructures of the city of which they have formulated critiques. These critiques, articulated and lived, are inscribed into their bodies, into the places they inhabit and the streets they traverse. Their stories point to accretive historical and discursive processes, to intergenerational legacies, and the structured conditions they inform. Yet, at the level of everyday practice, they suggest, creativities are enacted and alternative modalities of being, can be conceived. It is the politics and potentialities of transgression that inspires this ethnographic enquiry into homelessness.
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Description
Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2022.
Keywords
CDA (Critical discourse analysis), Sociology, Urban -- South Africa, Race relations -- South Africa, South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1994-, Haven Night Shelter -- South Africa -- Belville, Safe Space Shelter -- South Africa -- Cape Town Forshore, Post-apartheid era -- South Africa, Apartheid -- South Africa, Ethnology -- Fieldwork -- Semiotics, Shelter for homeless -- Social conditions -- South Africa, Haven Night Shelter Welfare Organization, HNSWO, UCTD