Browsing by Author "Makhulu, AM"

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    Afterword: Labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa
    (Journal of Southern African Studies, 2016-09-02) Makhulu, AM
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    Gaining ground: Squatters and the right to the city
    (2017-01-01) Makhulu, AM
    This essay concerns the history of squatting in Cape Town beginning in the early to mid-twentieth century and concluding after the transition to democracy. It focuses specifically on a series of contiguous settlements in the south eastern region of the Cape Metropolitan Area.
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    The "dialectics of toil": Reflections on the politics of space after apartheid
    (Anthropological Quarterly, 2010-06-01) Makhulu, AM
    Sixteen years since the end of the liberation struggle South Africa's cities have become crucial spaces of self-determination and lively community democracy. Yet their form has changed very little instead highlighting the persistence of poverty (and racism) within neoliberal, post-apartheid capitalism that the transition promised to end. This article explores the enduring quality of deep economic and social marginalization, specifically in the context of Cape Town's informal settlements, which reflect both collective desires for "rights to the city" and their denial. © 2010 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
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    The conditions for after Work: Financialization and informalization in posttransition South Africa
    (PMLA, 2012-10-01) Makhulu, AM
    IN A TIME OF FINANCIAL CRISIS, THE AMOUNT OF TALK ABOUT THE Nature and challenges of employment-what Kathi Weeks aptly describes as "the problem with work" in her eponymous book (2011)-should hardly be surprising. While work is in short supply in some parts of the world, in others employment has intensified and necessarily become increasingly exploitative; in still other places work, in the sense of formal wage employment, has rarely if ever been a given. Addressing these structural transformations in the global labor market, theorists have tried to develop a new vocabulary to describe the precariousness of work: the emergence of a class of workers made up of those destined to remain poor because of underemployment or depressed wages and those subject to intermittent and even permanent unemployment. This new "contingent class," though perhaps analogous to Karl Marx's lumpen proletariat (Eighteenth Brumaire), has arisen from different conditions.
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    Trump, Zuma, Brexit: anti-Black racism and the truth of the world
    (Safundi, 2020-01-01) Makhulu, AM
    “Trump, Zuma, Brexit” aims to articulate a new theory of the “world historical” reversing the relationship of north and south–of “universal knowledge” and “raw fact”–instead establishing a theoretical ground from the southern hemisphere and toward the north. The echoes and parallels of the current political, economic, and social moment across the distinct national geographies of South Africa, the US, and the UK, suggest two things: one, that white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and extreme inequality are foundational to the current world order; and two, that South Africa offers a very particular perspective. The paradox of anti-Black racism in South Africa–the fact that Black people remain the primary extractive targets of racial capitalism despite the country’s democratic transition–begins to show how intractable the problem of racial capitalism is both in its geographical extent and given its historical reach from the moment of the rise of Atlantic capitalism into the present.