| Publications [#153311] of Anne-Maria B. Makhulu
search escholarship.org.Articles & Book Chapters
- Anne-Maria Makhulu. "The Question of Freedom: Post-Emancipation South Africa in a Neoliberal Age." Ethnographies of Neoliberalism. Edited
by Carol J. Greenhouse. (2010.): 376 pages.
Abstract:
The history of struggle which culminated in
South Africa’s political transition in the
early 90s is well known. Yet its official
and relatively untroubled face rests on an
exquisite contradiction, namely the
subsumption of the very political ideals for
which people fought during the course of more
than four decades in the very form of liberal
constitutional democracy itself, moreover,
under the sign of neoliberalism. Thus
whatever the protections afforded or implied
by the constitution—a constitution which by
all accounts is the envy of the world for its
high level of inclusivity—-many such critical
aspects of this document remain unrealizable.
To be sure South Africa is not unique in its
limited capacity to translate political
ideals into concretely experienced outcomes.
Yet, coming to freedom so belatedly, South
Africa has all too clearly shown the limits
of emancipation under late capitalism—-its
postcolonial status so deferred that it made
the contradictions of its coming into being
all the more visible. Imagine then the very
concrete paradoxes that follow from a notion
of political struggle conceived as radical
revolution; whose central charter had long
promised the nationalization of everything--
the seizure of land from a landed elite, in
sum, the reclaiming of the Commons--but whose
achievement came after "actually existing
socialism." This new world order had made
revolutions and transitions no longer
thinkable, speakable, or practicable. It is
against the backdrop of such transformations
that South African emancipation is conceived
in this essay.
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