The Politics of Selective Dispossession: Land Invasions in Post-Apartheid Cape Town

• In Event: 563 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Community and Urban Sociology Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Global Urbanization and Space

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that democratization in post-apartheid South Africa has entailed a shift from indiscriminate to selective dispossession. Instead of the coerced expulsions and relocations of apartheid, the post-apartheid state has pursued a strategy within each informal settlement of distinguishing between subjects of delivery -- those who receive state-provisioned houses or upgrading -- and the undeserving poor. This latter category is typically removed to peripherally located state-run transit camps. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, structured interviews, and archival research in Cape Town over the past two years, I trace the trajectory of three recent land invasions in a peripherally located township, demonstrating how selective dispossession plays out in each of the three cases. I argue that in order to comprehend the dynamics of selective dispossession, we need to examine what I identify as “struggles for representation” and “struggles for recognition” at the level of each settlement. Struggles for representation occur at the intra-settlement level and consist of residents vying for control over the ability to speak on behalf of the entire population of the settlement. Struggles for recognition consist of factions purporting to represent the settlement appealing to supra-settlement entities such as parties, non-governmental organizations, or above all, the municipal state. The specific configurations of representation and recognition explain the fate of each respective land occupation, allowing us to make sense of a novel form of dispossession common to most postcolonial democracies.

Author

• Zachary Levenson, University of California-Berkeley