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  • Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands by Kerry Ryan Chance
  • Heike Becker
Kerry Ryan Chance, Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224 pp.

Much has been written about popular protests, labor struggles, and social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. However, little attention has been paid to the material reality and the agency of activists. Instead, social movements have mostly been discussed as ideal social and political forms, often with reference to South Africa’s past anti-apartheid struggle. Kerry Chance sets out to address these lacunae of South African social movement research. At the heart of Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands are the contradictions of popular politics in (neo)liberal 21st century South Africa, their materiality, and the interactions between activists with the governing former liberation movement, the African National Congress.

Chance tracks these connections through the living politics of the poor in Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Her focus is on the poorest of the poor: shack dwellers, those who live in the urban areas that are variously referred to as “informal settlements” or “slums.” At the heart of her ethnography is living politics, the term that has been coined by activists of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the largest shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa, which grew out of the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban. Since 2005, Abahlali has been fighting evictions and running campaigns to improve the living conditions of the urban poor. Living politics to these activists is, as Chance explains their understanding, “using everyday materials—fire, water, air, and land—to transform what it means to belong as a citizen” (viii).

The book is built around these material elements of popular politics, each element being the focus of one of the book’s chapters. Chance [End Page 1283] shows adeptly how the material conditions and the politics of insurrection from below come together. The activists from South Africa’s vast shack-lands were insurgent citizens long before much noted strident student movements shook the post-apartheid society in 2015–2016 with experimental and militant forms of protest, such as throwing out buckets of poo to remonstrate against persistent racism and growing inequality.

Kerry Chance’s thoughtful, close ethnography mobilizes the materiality of life, governance, and protest. Fire has particularly punctuated life and politics in South Africa’s shack settlements and struggles since the mid-1980s. In past and present struggles, activists have torched offices and infrastructure tied to the structures of power. Yet, fire also symbolizes the inhumanity that shack dwellers experience every day with the common experience of scorching shack fires that devastate the lives of the poor. Where fire has been potent and disruptive in the attempts to transform life and citizenship, water has played an equally forceful yet different role. Chance demonstrates that in contrast to fire, which powerfully draws lines of racial and ethnic difference, water acts as a channel that connects the desires of inclusive citizenship, especially in negotiations between activists and state agents. Air, then, symbolizes and is at once tangibly felt as pollution and practices of breathing in the contaminated environment of the shacklands, where “coughing out” is commonly used metaphorically to emphasize the demands of the politics to sustain life in poor neighborhoods. Land, finally, takes up first place in the complex and fractious battles over territorial sovereignty between activists from among the poor who “illegally” occupy urban terrain and the state agents in the neoliberal ambition to build “world class cities” in post-apartheid South Africa.

Tracing everyday practices around fire, water, air, and land as resources of precarious lives and as elements of living politics, Chance explores the upsurge of popular protests in South Africa in the 21st century. She places special emphasis on the interactions between the urban poor and state agents. In a fine-grained ethnography, she puts her finger deftly on the rise of ethnonationalist sentiments in the conflicts around living politics and citizenship. She further discusses the poignant resurgence of official language of “slums” in need of “clearance” and “betterment,” thus signaling the return of apartheid-era language in the era of liberal governance and neoliberal capitalism...

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