At Home with Apartheid

Rebecca Ginsburg's At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg is a refreshing addition to the recently renewed scholarly interest in South African domestic service. Tracing cycles of African women's mobility across the racialized spatial geographies of apartheid South Africa, from rural homestead to the backyard and back again, Ginsburg reconstructs African women's service in and servicing of white homes in Johannesburg's northern suburbs during the 1960s and 1970s. At Home sensitively explores the rhythms and tempos of the working day, the constraints and opportunities of working and familial life, as well as the dangers and degradations for African women living and working in the hearts of whiteness. It offers an historical sociology of power and domination, resistance, and submission, in and through racialized service. While this is interesting, it is not distinctive, with the recent proliferation of scholarship on domestic service having explored and exhausted this analytical terrain. Instead, At Home distinguishes itself in its unique and creative analysis of the spatialities of service.

Economy · Mobilities · Political science · Power (physics) · Resistance (ecology) · Scholarship · Service (business) · Social science · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Law · South African History and Culture