Engendering Safety and Displacing Danger in South Africa

• In Event: 3265 - Space and Place

Abstract

This paper illustrates how race, class, gender, and nation constitute conceptions of “safe” or “dangerous” spaces through the case of the South African township tourism market. In the aftermath of apartheid, the South African tourism industry has expanded rapidly, providing opportunities for both global image construction and foreign capital acquisition. Township tourism attracts white middle-class Westerners to underdeveloped black communities presumed to be dangerous but also (or thus) authentically African. Drawing from eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork with poor black women who have established home-based bed and breakfasts, I show how these entrepreneurs marshal their disadvantaged identities to combat perceptions of township risk. By engendering feelings of safety and displacing conditions of danger for international tourists, they invite Western capital to South Africa’s dispossessed settlements while buoying the state’s reputation on the global stage. Thus, these women are not only “multiply oppressed” but also creative agents in a political economy that constrains and enables them.

Author

• Annie Hikido, University of California-Santa Barbara