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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Splintered imaginaries: Self, 'community' and belonging in a 'working-class suburb' in post-apartheid Johannesburg
| Panel |
57. Post-apartheid's social imaginaries
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| Paper ID | 737 |
| Author(s) |
Du Plessis, Irma
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Questions about making and becoming a nation, the conditions for and ways of belonging to this nation, and the kind of moral order this process gives shape to occupy a central place in public debate and in recent scholarship on post-apartheid South Africa. Following Benedict Anderson and Charles Taylor, this paper explores these issues, albeit on a micro level. It is based on a series of in-depth interviews with fifteen individuals who live, work, play or pass through Jan Hofmeyr, Johannesburg and its immediate surrounds. Jan Hofmeyr is a former council housing scheme "built in the 1930s and designated for the social betterment of poor whites" that is now a racially mixed suburb. Situated in a part of the city that is home to the poor, but not always the poorest, the area has not been targeted for re-development by the city, largely due to its status as a white betterment area under apartheid. How do individuals who occupy different and complex subjectivities understand and make sense of this social space? How do they describe their interactions and relationships with those that share their space? How do they imagine this 'community', if indeed they do, and what do they see as the predicaments of the present and the possibilities of the future? |
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