The native body as blue ground
South Africa's infrastructural production of race
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3647867 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zandi Sherman (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 29-45 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Dynamics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0253-3952 • E-ISSN: 1940-7874 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02533952.2022.2038437 |
| OpenAlex | W4220711143 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 26 |
South African municipalities increasingly celebrate prepaid water and electricity meters for enabling them to build more resilient cities. This framing has been critiqued for its neoliberal underpinnings, where the discourse of resilience masks the reality that people are being coerced into surviving with consistently diminishing resources. While these infrastructures undeniably materialise neoliberal logics, this paper considers the labour compounds of nineteenth-century Kimberley to suggest such infrastructures also have a racialising function with a much older lineage. The Kimberley compounds were designed and managed by various technical experts tasked with maximising productivity and balancing economic constraints with mortality rates. In so doing, they relied upon and produced racialised theories of the body. Where the experts framed their work as turning on the observation of “the native races,” in fact those experts were producing the very racial truths they claimed only to uncover. The compound, most often studied as an infrastructure of racial domination, has rarely been recognised as productive of emergent notions of “race.” Read through this lineage, continued infrastructural coercion in contemporary South Africa, which relies on the techno-racial expertise developed in earlier eras, reveals itself as critical to race’s continual reproduction
Geography · Political economy · Political science · Psychological resilience · Reproduction · Sociology · Gender Studies · South African History and Culture · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Ecology
The Diamond Mines of South Africa
Disabling Globalization
Green Apartheid
Discourses of Infrastructure and Citizenship in Post-Apartheid Soweto
South Africa's City of Diamonds
Golden Gulag
Democracy's Infrastructure
The Threat of Race
De Beers’s Diamond Mine in the 1880s
The Engineer in South Africa
Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter
Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism
Engineering inter-imperialism
From Racial to Class Apartheid
Kimberley's Model Compounds
Infrastructures of Race
The Right to Maim
The 1875 black flag revolt on the Kimberley diamond fields
Rethinking urban South Africa
The Rise of American Mining Engineers
Racial Capitalism
Citizenship Prepaid
The Production of Difference
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |