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Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

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Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become an extreme yet unexceptional embodiment of forces at play in many other regions of the world: intensifying inequality alongside “wageless life,” proliferating forms of protest and populist politics that move in different directions, and official efforts at containment ranging from liberal interventions targeting specific populations to increasingly common police brutality.

Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits long-standing debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts, and struggles in the arenas of everyday life feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of African National Congress hegemony and the proliferation of populist politics.

This book provides an innovative analysis of the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today. It also suggests how Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated for present circumstances with the help of philosopher and liberation activist Frantz Fanon, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.

ISBN-13: 9780820347172

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Publication Date: 03-15-2014

Pages: 296

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Series: Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series #20

GILLIAN HART is a professor of geography and cochair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is the author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa and coeditor of Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics. GILLIAN HART is a professor of geography and cochair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is the author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa and coeditor of Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher


“Gillian Hart offers a defining challenge to our understanding of the contemporary crisis in South Africa. This book raises the bar in scholarly and political debate, and is a long-awaited sequel to Disabling Globalization.”—Ari Sitas, professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town, author of The Mandela Decade 1990–2000: Labour, Culture and Society in Post- Apartheid South Africa

“A book of this calibre recasts how we think about what has been happening in South Africa. Hart has conjured an exceptional work that might just help the left begin figuring out how to stop spinning its wheels.”—Hein Marais, author of South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Note to the U.S. Edition: South Africa after Mandela? xiii

List of Abbreviations xxiii

Chapter 1 Contours of Crisis in South Africa 1

Chapter 2 From Bredell to Marikana: The Dialectics of Protest and Containment 28

Chapter 3 The Unruly Terrains of Local Government 95

Chapter 4 Revisiting the Transition: De-Nationalisation and Re-Nationalisation 155

Chapter 5 The Unravelling of ANC Hegemony: Generations of Populist Politics 189

Chapter 6 Through the Lens of Passive Revolution: The South African Crisis Revisited 219

Select Bibliography 243

Index 255