Can Black Get Blacker? Neo-Racial Spatialization, Education, and Marginal Youth Positioning in Postapartheid Cape Town

• In Event: Education and the Racialization of Neoliberal Urban Governance: A Critical Geography Approach to Multiple Urban Contexts

Abstract

Within the history of South Africa race has invariably been used to conjure up particular images of crises, particularly with regard to the schooling of marginalised youth living in urban spaces. In the contemporary period connotations of race and turmoil remain readily visible within a variety of policy discussions about how to respond to the challenges posed by poor, uneducated, disadvantaged, and needy black youth in urban settings.

The key purpose of the next paper is to historically locate differential youth forms and shapes in the post-apartheid period within the neo-racialisation of educational city spaces in the past, and to examine how the grammar of race continues to position the ways in which youth think about education within their everyday lives in the urban city (leading to some becoming blacker than black). Acknowledging Brenner and Theodore’s positioning of neoliberal urbanism as always in production, shifting continuously and in experimental ways, the paper shows how a variety of youth in contemporary Cape Town grapple with notions of race and blackness as they interact and make sense (often contradictorily) of the socio-spatial dynamics of the city and their place within it. In so doing the authors point to the complex interactions of everyday networks, discursive materials and human agency in deeply impoverished terrains as youth struggle to come to terms with the neoliberal workings of the contemporary urban city.

Nascent writing on youth subjectivity in South Africa has highlighted the social dimension of schooling and the changing social geography thereof in its urban cities. Swartz (2009), Lancaster (2011), Bray et al. (2010), Soudien (2007) and Author (2007, 2009) variously discuss young people’s social locations in newer urban social geographies, how they navigate the environs of the urban city to access its schools, and the adaptations and dispositions they develop as they journey across urban spaces. In the latter regard, Author (2007, 2008, 2009) more particularly examines the precarious bodily adjustments that young people make as they struggle to access schools in new spaces. This paper, in pointing to how schooling has come to reflect broader social processes that have emerged in South African cities (Soudien 2007), examines the particular ways in which race as both a social and bodily adjustment has informed new forms of social contestation and frames within the neoliberal urban discourse of Cape Town. The authors suggest that the different ways in which education is lived, assimilated and iterated within the everyday lives of youth, and in the ways they organise and make meaning of their social lives via schooling access, religion, friendships, and family life practices - which each have individual forms, symbols and codes - shapes the particular ways in which they attain membership to, and make sense of, other aspects of social life in the city, such as the state, economy, and hostile, individuated, and often deeply raced citizens. The authors assert that the above forms come together as an amalgam of vectors firmly organised around urban restructuring, neoliberal discourse, and associated imputed value systems.

Authors

• Nur Mohammed Azeem Badroodien, Stellenbosch University

• Aslam Fataar, Stellenbosch University