Ashwin Desai
Biographic Data
| ID | 3613729 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ashwin Desai |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ashwin |
| FAMILY NAME | Desai |
| SIGNATURE | DESAI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Johannesburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4091-7449 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The politics of economics in South Africa, 1990–1994: The case of the Macroeconomic Research Group
Out of Apartheid’s (Racial) Corner: One Man’s Journey from Bare-Fists to Bible-Puncher
Raymond Mentor tells the story of personal transformation, from being a feared gangster to a preacher, through the sport of boxing. Placing boxing in the context of South Africa’s history of forced displacements, Mentor’s relationship with the sport gives us rare insights into how uprooted communities (re)built their lives while negotiating questions of racial and more localised identities. The reading of Mentor’s life through boxing, against the…
Girmitiyas and the Global Indian Diaspora: Origins, Memories, and Identity
Many Indians journeyed out of India to supplant the loss of slave labour in the former European plantation colonies of Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century onwards. This book aims to highlight the careers of these migrants who served as vital agents in building the global society of the twenty-first century. It explores the transformative experiences of those who migrated, and the memories of those wh…
The revenge of history: Indian indenture and its afterlife in South Africa
Geographies of racial capitalism: The 2021 July riots in South Africa
In July 2021, riots involving large-scale looting of businesses enveloped parts of South Africa. The “spark” for the violence was the incarceration of the country’s former President, Jacob Zuma. While referring to the broader dynamics of the riots, this article focusses on one township of Durban, Phoenix. Here, the violence was headlined as taking a racial turn, setting African against Indian. By situating the analysis against the African Nationa…
Colour, Class and Community - The Natal Indian Congress, 1971-1994
An important study of the revival of the Natal Indian Congress in 1971 to the first democratic elections in 1994. In fascinating detail, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed bring the inner workings of the NIC to life against the canvas of major political developments in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s
A fool’s errand? Black Consciousness and the 1970s debate over the “Indian” in the Natal Indian Congress
Bantu Stephen Biko, born in Tarkastad in the Eastern Cape was murdered by the South African apartheid regime in September 1977, aged 31. The year 2021 marks the 75th anniversary of his birth. Biko remains iconic, but a figure that exists on the margins in South Africa. His impact in challenging both apartheid-imposed race categories and the dominant thinking of the African National Congress (ANC) inspired a whole generation through the 1970s. Thi…
Mcebisi Ndletyana’s Anatomy of the ANC in Power: Insights from Port Elizabeth, 1999–2019 – A critical review
What good is there in knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn’t make us love it? What point is there in knowing vice, if this knowledge doesn’t make us shun it? By heaven, if the will is co
Inside the cricket change room: Undressing whiteness in South Africa
South African cricket was awakened to the crudity of racial exclusions when former Proteas fast bowler Makhaya Ntini revealed that he would rather run to the ground and back than take the team bus to avoid his white team-mates who, he felt, were isolating him because of the colour of his skin. Ntini’s revelation of the pain of loneliness was followed by a plethora of similar ones by Black cricketers, sparked by young Proteas player Lungisani Ngid…
Indian South Africans: (Be)-Longing and the Post-Apartheid Search for Roots and the Imagined Family
The Indian Relief Act of 1914 severely curtailed the right of Indians to settle in South Africa. As the twentieth century unfolded and the South African government passed a succession of discriminatory laws against Indians, Indian nationalists sought the isolation of the white minority regime. This increased the ‘distance’ between Indian South Africans and India. The ending of apartheid and the normalization of relations between India and South A…
The race chase: The colour of cricket transformation in South Africa
South African cricket (re)entered international cricket in 1991, a few years before the country’s first democratic elections. A tour of India was a prelude to playing in the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. From the outset of ‘unity’, cricket was lauded for its transformation programme and for making a decisive break with the past. This break was epitomized by the team being called the Proteas rather than the Springboks. Despite this …
A History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans, 1990-2019
While small in number, the place of the Indian in South Africa has historically loomed large because of their strong commercial and professional middle class, international influence through India, the commitment of many Indians to the anti-apartheid struggle and the prominent role that they have played in political and economic life post-apartheid. A History of the Present is the first book-length overview of Indian South Africans in the quarter…
Speculators and Scoundrels in South Africa's Secondary Circuit of Capital: A Turbulent Investment Climate at Durban's Point Waterfront
the urban waterfront has become a new frontier of the city with opportunities for significant aesthetic, economic, social and environmental benefits; it is also the new battleground over conflict
Race, Place and Everyday Life in Contemporary South Africa: Wentworth, Durban
The Zuma moment: Between tender-based capitalists and radical economic transformation
The Jacob Zuma Presidency (2009–2017) was dogged by persistent allegations of corruption and the looting of State Owned Enterprises (SOE’s) by those allied to him. It led to allegations of state capture that placed the Gupta family at the centre of this project. These allegations have been highly contested, with Zuma supporters arguing that he has come under attack because of his support for the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South…
Service delivery and the war within: Wentworth, Durban, South Africa
The events and reflections recounted in this article draw from a larger project that sought to understand the notion of urban belonging in the post-apartheid city. In particular, the focus centred on neighbourhoods in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, once set aside for those defined as coloured. To this end, I began conducting interviews in Alabama Road, Wentworth, a township in the south basin of the city of Durban. In the midst of these int…
Stuck in the middle? Indians in South Africa's fading rainbow
This article examines the political and economic position of Indians in post-apartheid South Africa, where they are sandwiched between an economically dominant white class and the majority African population. It provides a brief background on African and Indian relations since the nineteenth century, and examines how and why these were strained at certain historical junctures. Against this background, the article explores issues of identity, nati…
The 2016 Local Government Elections in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Is Jesus on His Way
Post-1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has increasingly allied itself to traditional authorities in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Part of the reason for this has been to undermine the support base of the Inkatha Freedom Party. In more recent times, the alliance between chiefs and the ANC has seen them linked to mining interests, often running roughshod over local forms of resistance. In addition, the August 2016 local government elections showed a…
The Coming of Nelson and the Ending of Apartheid Cricket? Gatting’s Rebels in South Africa, 1990
The year 1990 is pivotal in South African history. The liberation movements were unbanned, and Nelson Mandela was freed in the midst of a tour by Mike Gatting’s English rebel cricket team. The newly constituted National Sports Congress, which had the support of the African National Congress, was at the forefront of protests against the tour. For once, Ali Bacher and apartheid cricket were on the back foot. However, the NSC did a sudden volte-face…
Indian South Africans and the Black Consciousness Movement under apartheid
In the late 1960s, “non-White” university students marched out of the white dominated but, at that stage, still multiracial, National Union of South African Students. They formed the South African Students Organisation (SASO) and began formulating an ideology called Black Consciousness. At its heart, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) called for the unity of South Africa’s oppressed, which they defined as African, Coloured and Indian. Those w…
Migrants and Violence in South Africa: The April 2015 Xenophobic Attacks in Durban
In 2015, a wave of xenophobic attacks swept across South Africa. The violence was at its worst in Durban, where thousands of immigrants, mainly from Africa, were attacked by their fellow South Africans, their businesses looted and people Jailed. This article looks at the sparks for the violence, while unpacking the complex relations between locals and African immigrants against the backdrop of an earlier episode of violence in 2008/9. The latter …
South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gand…
The Natal Indian Congress, the Mass Democratic Movement and the Struggle to Defeat Apartheid: 1980–1994
The Natal Indian Congress (NIC) was revived in 1971 in the context of what has become known as the ‘Durban moment’. This period also witnessed the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement and an independent trade union movement inspired by the 1973 Durban strikes. Despite a government crackdown and opposition from anti-apartheid groups that asserted that ethnic identities were a relic of the past, the NIC attracted younger activists through …
An Aerotropolis Lands in Durban, South Africa: Exploring the "Satanic Geographies" of Fast Capitalism
King Shaka rose like a colossus in his day and age to make Kwa-Zulu a place of Zulus. ... He made one people out of many peoples. ... King Shaka ... was the greatest visionary of his time. ... That great K
Of Faustian Pacts and Mega-projects: The Politics and Economics of the Port Expansion in the South Basin of Durban, South Africa
Notes1 The numbers refer to the lines in Goethe's Faust
We are the poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa
"When Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, freedom-loving people around the world hailed a victory over racial domination. The end of apartheid did not change the basic conditions of the oppressed majority, however. Material inequality has deepened and new forms of solidarity and resistance have emerged in communities that have forged new and dynamic political identities.". "We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most…
But We Were Thousands: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State's turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequ…
Uncomfortable Collaborations’: Contesting Constructions of the ‘Poor’ in South Africa
This article deconstructs the problematic way the ‘Poor’ are represented by the intellectual ‘Left’ as a fixed, virtuous subject. Even while this fixed identity is actively mobilised by people themselves to gain symbolic and real power, I argue that the philosopher's fixation on the singular subjectivity of the oppressed confines the ‘Poor’ to their very subjugation. Instead, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how agency and oppression occ…
Neoliberalism and Resistance in South Africa
An aspect of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa was inadvertently captured at the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting held at the International Convention Centre in Durban, in June 2002, as the police arrived with a massive show of force and drove protesters away from the building with batons and charging horses. One of the organizers of the WEF was approached by an incredulous member of the foreign media and…
The Zuma moment: Between tender-based capitalists and radical economic transformation
The Jacob Zuma Presidency (2009–2017) was dogged by persistent allegations of corruption and the looting of State Owned Enterprises (SOE’s) by those allied to him. It led to allegations of state capture that placed the Gupta family at the centre of this project. These allegations have been highly contested, with Zuma supporters arguing that he has come under attack because of his support for the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South…
World Cup 2010: Africa’s turn or the turn on Africa
The awarding of World Cup 2010 to South Africa was hailed as a great ‘victory’ for the African continent and the cause of much celebration. It heightened expectations not only about the spectacle itself but about the benefits that would accrue to South Africa and the rest of Africa. This essay examines the notion of the successful bid as an ‘African victory’ in the context of global power relations in football, South Africa’s alleged function as …
We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Of Faustian Pacts and Mega-projects: The Politics and Economics of the Port Expansion in the South Basin of Durban, South Africa
Notes1 The numbers refer to the lines in Goethe's Faust
Prefigurative Political Ecology and Socio-Environmental Injustice in Central Durban
Between Apartheid and Neoliberalism in Durban's Indian Quarter
South Africa and the global order: The structural conditioning of a transition to democracy
Labour Relations in Transition: The Rise of Corporatism in South Africa's Automobile Industry
The ownership, management, and supervision of South Africa's automobile industry has since its inception been overwhelmingly white. It was also highly oppressive in that the foremen, armed with powers of hiring, promotion, and dismissal, ruled the shopfloor with grim determination. Black workers, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly confronted these labour relations practices with collective industrial action that sometimes made enterp…
A case of ‘strategic ethnicity’? The Natal Indian Congress in the 1970s
This article focuses on the revival of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1971 in the context of what is retrospectively known as the 'Durban moment'. The early 1970s witnessed the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) as well as a resurgence of working class collective action that was to form the embryo of the independent labour movement later in the decade. This article examines the debates surrounding the revival of the NIC, in p…
After the rainbow: Following the footprints of the May 2008 xenophobic violence in South Africa
In May 2008, African immigrants were attacked across South Africa. The violence was captured in a horrifying image of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a 35-year old father of three from Mozambique, who w
Between the Push and the Shove: Everyday Struggles and the Re-making of Durban
Durban has embarked on an ambitious programme to re-make the city into a preferred destination for mega-sports events. In order to achieve this it has earmarked the area closest to the central beachfront to build sporting facilities and related infrastructure. This article looks at the consequences of this re-making by focusing on how the poor in the inner city have been affected. The article concentrates on two areas – Albert Park where African …
Managing South African transformation: The story of cricket in KwaZulu Natal, 1994–2004
Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative act…
The politics of economics in South Africa, 1990–1994: The case of the Macroeconomic Research Group
The revenge of history: Indian indenture and its afterlife in South Africa
The 2016 Local Government Elections in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Is Jesus on His Way
Post-1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has increasingly allied itself to traditional authorities in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Part of the reason for this has been to undermine the support base of the Inkatha Freedom Party. In more recent times, the alliance between chiefs and the ANC has seen them linked to mining interests, often running roughshod over local forms of resistance. In addition, the August 2016 local government elections showed a…
The Natal Indian Congress, the Mass Democratic Movement and the Struggle to Defeat Apartheid: 1980–1994
The Natal Indian Congress (NIC) was revived in 1971 in the context of what has become known as the ‘Durban moment’. This period also witnessed the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement and an independent trade union movement inspired by the 1973 Durban strikes. Despite a government crackdown and opposition from anti-apartheid groups that asserted that ethnic identities were a relic of the past, the NIC attracted younger activists through …
An Aerotropolis Lands in Durban, South Africa: Exploring the "Satanic Geographies" of Fast Capitalism
King Shaka rose like a colossus in his day and age to make Kwa-Zulu a place of Zulus. ... He made one people out of many peoples. ... King Shaka ... was the greatest visionary of his time. ... That great K
South Africa: Between the Second Transition and a Second Term-A Second Sharpeville
He has nothing to lose so he reaches for the stars. For where do we go when it falls apart in our hands and we are Left with less than we started with? Begin again? And with what? Where are the dre
Magic, Realism and the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa
What stank in the past is the present's perfume: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park
Research Article| October 01 2004 “What stank in the past is the present's perfume”: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park Ashwin Desai; Ashwin Desai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Pithouse Richard Pithouse Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (4): 841–875. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-4-841 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Fac…
Cosatu and the Democratic Transition in South Africa: Drifting Towards Corporatism
Minorities in the rainbow nation: The Indian vote in 1994
South Africa's first democratic non-racial elections took place on 27 April 1994. While there have been numerous papers analysing the results of the election, scant attention has been paid to the voting patterns of Indian South Africans in KwaZulu-Natal. Indian South Africans voted in significant numbers for the Minority Front at the provincial level, and the National Party at the central government level. This article uses middle-man theory and …
Labour Relations in Transition: The Rise of Corporatism in South Africa's Automobile Industry
The ownership, management, and supervision of South Africa's automobile industry has since its inception been overwhelmingly white. It was also highly oppressive in that the foremen, armed with powers of hiring, promotion, and dismissal, ruled the shopfloor with grim determination. Black workers, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly confronted these labour relations practices with collective industrial action that sometimes made enterp…
South Africa and the global order: The structural conditioning of a transition to democracy
The Poors of Chatsworth
Indians in South Africa
We are the poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa
"When Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, freedom-loving people around the world hailed a victory over racial domination. The end of apartheid did not change the basic conditions of the oppressed majority, however. Material inequality has deepened and new forms of solidarity and resistance have emerged in communities that have forged new and dynamic political identities.". "We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most…
Neoliberalism and Resistance in South Africa
An aspect of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa was inadvertently captured at the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting held at the International Convention Centre in Durban, in June 2002, as the police arrived with a massive show of force and drove protesters away from the building with batons and charging horses. One of the organizers of the WEF was approached by an incredulous member of the foreign media and…
We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in Kwazulu-Natal
Sanction All Revolts: A Reply to Rebecca Pointer
This article is a reply to Rebecca Pointer’s response to our paper, ‘“But We Were Thousands”: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park’. It begins by making some remarks on the terrain in which academic interventions in elite publics are made in contemporary South Africa. In particular, it notes the general tacit support for a highly repressive response (discursive and material) to subaltern dissent. The article then…
Magic, Realism and the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Managing South African transformation: The story of cricket in KwaZulu Natal, 1994–2004
Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative act…
What stank in the past is the present's perfume: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park
Research Article| October 01 2004 “What stank in the past is the present's perfume”: Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park Ashwin Desai; Ashwin Desai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Richard Pithouse Richard Pithouse Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (4): 841–875. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-4-841 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Fac…
But We Were Thousands: Dispossession, Resistance, Repossession and Repression in Mandela Park
This article seeks to give an outline of the key events in the unfolding struggle in Mandela Park, Cape Town, South Africa, against evictions and disconnections from water and electricity. It also seeks to situate this sketch of the emergence and trajectory of these struggles in a broader narrative about the Post-Apartheid State's turn to neo-liberalism. We argue that, in certain instances, the increased political legitimacy of the State, consequ…
"Ways of (Sight) Seeing" in KwaZulu-Natal, Part One
These stories of the wonderful and tragic sights and sounds of KwaZulu-Natal(KZN) were written over the last decade. Here and there they have been updated; in other places where it made sense to qu
"Ways of (Sight) Seeing" in KwaZulu-Natal, Part Two, Mooi River
Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914
Many were filled with hopes as high as the stars as they crossed the Indian Ocean, making their way from India to Durban in southern Africa in the late 1800s. Yet, realising the dream of a better life and returning home triumphant was not to be for many. Thousands returned with less than they had started out with, only to find that home was no longer the place they had left. The travellers, too, had changed irrevocably: caste had been transgresse…
The Making and (RE) Making of Ethnic Identity: The Case of Indian South Africans
Traditionally, Indian South African have been viewed as a homogeneous community, and presented a united front in opposing apartheid. However, the democratic era has witnessed the resurgence of ethnic and sub-ethnic identities (class, language, religion, geographic origins), Attempts to reconnect to the motherland have exacerbated these tendencies. Indians enjoyed a relatively privileged position compared to that of the African majority primarily …
Uncomfortable Collaborations’: Contesting Constructions of the ‘Poor’ in South Africa
This article deconstructs the problematic way the ‘Poor’ are represented by the intellectual ‘Left’ as a fixed, virtuous subject. Even while this fixed identity is actively mobilised by people themselves to gain symbolic and real power, I argue that the philosopher's fixation on the singular subjectivity of the oppressed confines the ‘Poor’ to their very subjugation. Instead, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how agency and oppression occ…
Entre destruction néolibérale et construction du commun: Le Pouvoir Des Quartiers
En Afrique du Sud, de nouveaux mouvements communautaires, où dominent les femmes, les jeunes, les pauvres, où tout le monde participe, sont apparus depuis la fin de l'apartheid. Ils luttent contre l'ANC, refusent de payer les services publics pour compenser les diminutions d'allocations, essaient d'inventer de nouveaux services. Les anciens militants de la libération nationale sont forcés de revoir leurs alliances et de se fondre dans ce mouvemen…
World Cup 2010: Africa’s turn or the turn on Africa
The awarding of World Cup 2010 to South Africa was hailed as a great ‘victory’ for the African continent and the cause of much celebration. It heightened expectations not only about the spectacle itself but about the benefits that would accrue to South Africa and the rest of Africa. This essay examines the notion of the successful bid as an ‘African victory’ in the context of global power relations in football, South Africa’s alleged function as …
Fatima Meer: From Public to Radical Sociologist
(2010). FATIMA MEER: FROM PUBLIC TO RADICAL SOCIOLOGIST. South African Review of Sociology: Vol. 41, SUBJECTS OF STELLENBOSCH: SNAPSHOTS OF EVERYDAY PRACTICES OF POWER, pp. 121-127
After the rainbow: Following the footprints of the May 2008 xenophobic violence in South Africa
In May 2008, African immigrants were attacked across South Africa. The violence was captured in a horrifying image of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a 35-year old father of three from Mozambique, who w
Between the Push and the Shove: Everyday Struggles and the Re-making of Durban
Durban has embarked on an ambitious programme to re-make the city into a preferred destination for mega-sports events. In order to achieve this it has earmarked the area closest to the central beachfront to build sporting facilities and related infrastructure. This article looks at the consequences of this re-making by focusing on how the poor in the inner city have been affected. The article concentrates on two areas – Albert Park where African …
Political science (41 works) · South African History and Culture (38 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Law (26 works) · Geography (23 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · History (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (14 works) · Political economy (12 works)