Thinking with geographically situated concepts
Yousuf Al‑Bulushi’s Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City (2024) is a richly textured ethnography that can be situated in a long tradition of theorizing capitalism from the people and places that constitute its supposed “peripheries”—from W. E. B. DuBois and the US South to C. L. R. James and the Caribbean, and to Cedric Robinson and the Mediterranean. And, of course, South Africa has long been central to politically transformative debates about the relationship between racism and capitalism, as seen in the work of theorists including (but not limited to) Harold Wolpe, Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Gillian Hart (Burden-Stelly 2020 ; Levinson and Paret 2023). Al‑Bulushi’s geographical and epistemological orientation on South Africa expands and even challenges many fundamental categories of political economic analysis—for instance, by rethinking politics beyond either liberal electoralism or trade unionism, precarity beyond the factory, and the worker–citizen nexus beyond the Global North.
Al‑Bulushi raises important questions about the conceptual distinctions between anti‑Blackness, anti‑Black racism, and racism, both in his book and more broadly for the study of liberatory politics. The note on racial terminology at the beginning of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City serves as an important reminder that the language of individual and collective (self-) identification also marks political horizons and commitments ; it is never neutral or objective, but should instead be understood as the slippery terrain upon which we do our work as both scholars and as organizers. As such, our analyses should always start with the following questions : (1) Why these categories or labels now—in other words, how does a group come to collectively understand itself in particular terms ? (2) What political possibilities do these terms enable, and what do they potentially foreclose ? And (3) How do we as scholars recognize these contested histories while also narrating a politically actionable story, without reproducing the conceptual “loops” (McKittrick 2015) that reproduce racial violence even as we seek to undo it ?
In the book’s introduction, Al‑Bulushi engages with salient debates about anti‑Blackness and racialization. If, as Nick Mitchell (2020) argues, “antiBlackness describes a historical formation that distinguishes Black people from all others,” then what precisely constitutes the “Black” in “anti‑Blackness” ? Does “Black” refer to a people (and if so, can we define that people without falling into the ontological traps of either biocentricity or geographical determinism) ? Or is “Black” a structural position into which different groups can be entrapped—a sort of Mbembian “becoming Black of the world” (2017) ? If the latter, how does this then destabilize anti‑Blackness as a structuring relation, ultimately bringing us back to precisely the historical and geographical contingency of Blackness that “anti‑Blackness” seeks to avoid ? And yet—and yet !— how do we also square the fluidity of Blackness with the structural continuities that Al‑Bulushi so carefully documents—where, for instance, in 2011 “black families earned only 60,000 rand per household on average, half of what the average colored household earns, a fourth of what the average Indian family earns, and a sixth of what the average white family earns” (p. 94) ?
The challenges of community-engaged research
Ruptures In the Afterlife of the Apartheid City also represents an instructive example of rigorous, community-engaged research that foregrounds local communities as theorists of their own conditions—what Abahlali baseMjondolo describes as “taking seriously the minds of the poor” (p. 189)—while also attending to the structural contradictions and tensions that shape the terrain of struggle upon which these communities are constrained to organize. While the history and practices of community-engaged research have varied widely across academic disciplines, it is also undeniable that there has been an increasing valorization of this genre of scholarship in academic institutions. But while at first blush this seems to be a positive development, it also raises a number of ethico-political questions for scholars : What makes up a “community” ? Does this entity we refer to as “community” speak with a single voice ? Does the notion of “community-engaged research” actually reproduce an illusory binary between university and community, knowledge and experience, theory and practice ? After all, as Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us in Freedom Dreams (2002, p. 8), “Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression.”
Another challenge has been the tendency in certain intellectual circles to seek out community organizations that can be vaunted as symbols of uncorrupted radicalism, from which scholars can subsequently extract conclusions about the politics of refusal. This is a phenomenon I have observed in some migration studies research, wherein refugees are heralded as abstracted symbols of radical, outer-national politics until the uncomfortable moment—at least, uncomfortable for the scholars who treat them as little more than dehumanized raw materials for theorizing—when they might seek certain kinds of formal recognition (Hawthorne 2022, pp. 18, 178–179). Al‑Bulushi navigates these challenges quite deftly, both through a nuanced analysis of the political as it extends beyond “formally organized mobilizations” and “civil society” (p. 121), and through the dilemma of how to move beyond rigidly binaristic pro- or anti-statist positions when deciphering the role of the state in liberatory politics (pp. 62, 136). For Al‑Bulushi, political organizing is always (and necessarily) improvisational, experimental, and prefigurative.
A number of scholars have weighed in on similar questions about community-engaged research, perhaps most famously Eve Tuck (2009) in her meditation on “damage-centered” and “desire-based” research. I am also reminded of Bandile Mdlalose’s (2014) reflections on the fate of Abahlali, and in particular her critique of the way an organization’s goals can begin to shift when it becomes an object of academic study. Feminist epistemology of course teaches us that there is a mutual process of transformation at the heart of any relationship between the “researcher” and the “researched” (and that this boundary is rarely so clear-cut ; as I frequently remind my students, even scientists understand this phenomenon via the “observer effect” in quantum physics). I would welcome the opportunity to learn from the author about how he navigated his dual roles as researcher and activist, or insider and outsider, and what he learned from these experiences about both activism and community-engaged or participatory research.
Neo-fascism, leftist politics and the state
The questions Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City raises about how to organize with, against, and in relation to the state—about autonomism, marronage, and fugitivity—resonate with questions I have long pondered in the Italian context around the politics of citizenship (Hawthorne 2022). But, more broadly, Al‑Bulushi raises a set of productively perplexing questions that are profoundly relevant to this moment in US politics, and to the global fascist resurgence as a whole. To paraphrase a question asked by a scholar at the 2017 Berkeley Black Geographies symposium, “Should our goal be the abolition of the state in general, or the abolition of this state in particular ?” In other words, is there a version of the state apparatus that can be a vehicle for a true politics of liberation, or is the state itself a hindrance to this goal ?
Left movements have developed sophisticated, fine-grained tools for resisting state power. In this work, the state and its attendant politics of citizenship and recognition are the problem, not the solution ; after all, as David Theo Goldberg (2002) argues, the modern state is a fundamentally racial (and gendered) formation. In this moment, however, we are witnessing the wholesale dismantling of liberal state institutions in a process that suggests a fascist story, rather than a purely neoliberal one. So, what does it mean when we suddenly find ourselves fighting for the very institutions we have long struggled against ? How do we organize to preserve DEI programs while also maintaining a skepticism of neoliberal, corporate diversity initiatives ? How do we challenge the rising tide of racial nationalism without romanticizing liberal multiculturalism ? How do we mobilize for citizenship rights while also building a world where nation-state citizenship does not determine one’s life chances ? How do we organize for a robust welfare state while also working toward the abolition of capitalism and the state institutions that subsidize it ? How do we mobilize for global economic justice and postcolonial repair while also acknowledging the profound limitations of international aid ? How do we support anticolonial movements for self-determination like the Palestinian freedom struggle while also recognizing that “nation-states necessarily reproduce the violences of colonialism” (Azeb 2017) ? As Al‑Bulushi shows, the shack-dwellers of Abahlali in Durban have much to teach us in this moment.
Articles in this series :
- 1. Introduction, by Christopher Courtheyn & Joseph Palis
- 2. Urban Racial Regimes, Development, and the Black Radical Tradition in South Africa, by Alex Loftus
- 3. Settler Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and the Urban Political, by Theresa Enright
- 4. Rethinking Capitalism, the State, and Black Politics from the Global South, by Camilla A. Hawthorne
- 5. Author response | Thinking with Abahlali : The Local State, Solidarity, and Research, by Yousuf Al‑Bulushi
Bibliography
- Al‑Bulushi, Y. 2024. Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City, London : Palgrave Macmillan.
- Azeb, S. 2017. “The ‘No-State Solution’ : Decolonizing Palestine beyond the West Bank and East Jerusalem”, The Funambulist, 27 February. Available online at the following URL : https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/10-architecture-colonialism/no-state-solution-decolonizing-palestine-beyond-west-bank-east-jerusalem.
- Burden-Stelly, C. 2020. “Modern US Racial Capitalism : Some Theoretical Insights”, Monthly Review, 1 July. Available online at the following URL : https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/modern-u-s-racial-capitalism.
- Goldberg, D. T. 2002. The Racial State, Oxford : Blackwell Publishing.
- Hawthorne, C. 2022. Contesting Race and Citizenship : Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean, Ithaca : Cornell University Press.
- Kelley, R. D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams : The Black Radical Imagination, Boston : Beacon Press.
- Levinson, Z. and Paret, M. 2023. “The South African tradition of racial capitalism”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 46, no. 16, pp. 3403–3424.
- Mbembe, A. 2017. Critique of Black Reason, Durham (North Carolina) : Duke University Press.
- McKittrick, K. 2015. “Diachronic loops/deadweight tonnage/bad made measure”, cultural geographies, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 3–18.
- Mdlalose, B. 2014. “The Rise and Fall of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African Social Movement”, Politikon, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 345–353.
- Mitchell, N. 2020. “The View from Nowhere : On Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism” Spectre, 8 November. Available online at the following URL : https://spectrejournal.com/the-view-from-nowhere.
- Tuck, E. 2009. “Suspending Damage : A Letter to Communities”, Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 409–427.
