U nsightly Huts”

Shanties and the Divestment Movement of the 1980s

Bibliographic Data

ID11219163
AuthorsBradford Martin (0000-0001-5297-5596, University of Bradford, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume32
Issue3
Pages329-360
Publication date2007-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePeace & Change (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0149-0508 • E-ISSN: 1468-0130
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1468-0130.2007.00444.x
OpenAlexW1990626070
LanguageEN
Citations received7

This article analyzes students’ efforts to pressure American colleges and universities to divest their South African investments during the 1980s, focusing on the movement's most visible feature, the shantytowns students built to express solidarity with black South Africans and to oppose their institutions’ investment policies. I argue that the shanties were constructed in spaces chosen to achieve maximum symbolic power and often succeeded in spatially transforming campuses into public forums that heightened students’ capacity to affect the institutional decision‐making process. Not surprisingly, the shanties evoked fervent responses. Shantytown residents identified with the plight of black South Africans under apartheid, while opponents called them “eyesores,” and, as in the notorious case at Dartmouth, even forcibly destroyed them. When set against the conservative tenor of the Reagan/Bush 1980s, the varying responses to campus shantytowns, at both elite private institutions as well as large public ones, raise important questions about the cultural constructedness of “vision” and aesthetics and about the efficacy and the limits of using public space for symbolic oppositional politics

Divestment · Elite · Investment (military · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Solidarity · Law · Race, History, and American Society · South African History and Culture

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