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In
Dispossession as Delivery, Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows that the government does this in the name of preserving the order they imagine is necessary to deliver housing to its citizens. Based upon a decade of participant observation in two land occupations in Cape Town, this book provides a novel, relational understanding about group formation and how collective actions interact with the state.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 · Two Occupations, One Eviction
- 2 · Dynamics of Delivery and Dispossession
- 3 · Civil Society I: Kapteinsklip and the Politics of Seriality
- 4 · Civil Society II: Siqalo and the Politics of Fusion
- 5 · Political Society I: Kapteinsklip and the Politics of Factionalism
- 6 · Political Society II: Siqalo and the Politics of Committees
- 7 · Four Theses on the Integral State
- Appendix · Methodological Reflections
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Zachary Levenson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. His work, which combines political and urban sociology, has appeared in Qualitative Sociology, Urban Studies, the Journal of Agrarian Change, and International Sociology, among other venues.
Summary
A sweeping historical and political analysis with detailed ethnographic fieldwork of the politics of everyday life in postcolonial Africa.
In post-apartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing, people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state's radar. Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. In Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson follows this journey from avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the post-apartheid Constitution shifts squatters' struggles onto the judicial register. Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers' struggles, Levenson further demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence. Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way ethnographers think about politics.
Additional text
Throughout the analysis, including the presentation of his rich ethnographic material and his careful theoretical readings, particularly of Gramsci, Levenson productively unsettles conventional conceptualizations of the state, social movements, and civil society. Given the rich insights it provides, I expect this book to be widely read and debated by ethnographers, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars working with these concepts. And going forward, I expect that scholars working on the bourgeois state and civil society will have to engage with and respond to these insightful reformulations.
