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The examples in this chapter are chosen from the African region and diverge among countries as the Asian examples did. Firms on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange have responded to the opportunities presented by the international system to switch their listings to London; however, given the shareholding patterns of these firms, what little external pressure on management has occurred, has developed from the listing requirements of the London, and not Johannesburg exchange. The Cairo exchange in Egypt boomed in the 1990s along with other emerging markets, yet it boomed by selling minority shares of family-controlled firms. Finally, the two West African exchanges of Ghana and Senegal are examples of extremely small, thin markets dominated by issues of one or two privatized firms. The chapter examines the shareholder arrangements of Anglo-American, Olympic Group, Ashanti Goldfields, and Sonatel.

Compared to the experimental and meta-fictional writing of her compatriots J. M. Coetzee and Ivan Vladislavic, Nadine Gordimer's novels may seem realist—more so than they actually are. There are several moments in Gordimer's work when she participates in a self-reflexive meditation on the meaning, form, and reception of fiction. One such moment occurs in the 1981 novel July's People, set in a fictional future of revolution and civil war. It is a scene of reading—a scene that tells us much about how we may read the concerns that engage and the conditions that mold Gordimer's writing. Maureen Smales, the novel's main character, who, only days before had been living the life of a comfortable Johannesburg suburbanite, is sitting outside a hut in the poor African village to which she and her family have hurriedly fled under the guidance of their previous servant, July.

This chapter offers a reading of the work of Ivan Vladislavic by way of demonstrating that its specific formal features capture the aura of a particular historical speace (Johannesburg) and time (the era of late or millennial capitalism) that nevertheless allows one to witness and reflect upon a general and global structure of feeling formed over the long duration of modernity’s unfolding. Read alongside incidents of occultism, witchcraft and trade in human organs in contemporary South Africa, Vladislavic's ‘anti-’ or ‘magic-’ realism points to the historical compulsion under which cultural modes operate in conditions of uneven development – the compulsion to fuse disparate idioms, languages, genres, and forms in order to meditate upon ordinary lives caught up in the dark magic of history. Vladislavic's thematic and formal concerns are interpreted as expressions of historical-material contraditions and paradoxes.

This chapter explores the cultural politics of bicycle infrastructure through an examination of attempts to build cycling lanes in Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1930s. In the 1930s in Johannesburg, with increasing rates of automobile use planners were grappling with road safety, congestion and rules. At the time, bicycles were still an important mode of transport. Vehicle licensing data from Johannesburg shows that up to 1935, more bicycles were registered than automobiles. In an effort to reduce growing conflicts between bicycles and motorists, the Johannesburg city council turned to the concept of separating traffic modes. I draw on data from archives, newspaper material, municipal reports and other published material. By showing how decisions on building of bicycle lanes and the expected conduct of the users and motorists were intrinsically shaped by prevailing social relations, circulation of ideas and practices between the United Kingdom and South Africa, it highlights the extent to which bicycle infrastructures are not neutral objects. They are socio-technical assemblages inextricable from place. As such this historical account foregrounds the importance of the contexts within which transitions occur. This is especially relevant in the contemporary moment of the return to the bicycle characterised by policy borrowing.

During the postwar period, Birmingham named itself the Magic City. This was because of the advance of heavy industry in the region, particularly the steel industry. As a result the population of Birmingham almost doubled during the period between 1940 and 1960. This growth was associated with the oligarchy of the “mules”, or the powerful industrialists. These big mules avoided politics and became actively involved only when their interests were threatened. Some perceived Birmingham to be America's most racist city, or “America's Johannesburg”. This chapter charts the course of various disputes regarding race and skin color across Birmingham and discusses how the Freedom Riders became involved in dealing with such issues.

It was not until the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, “the Brundtland Report” and the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that the term “sustainable development” gained global currency. Over 7,000 delegates from 178 countries recognised a global need for environmental protection with economic and social development, and called for sustainable development. In 1997, governments met in the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Sustainable Development to review progress; they urged further development of the concept, and greater efforts for its implementation on all levels. In 2002, at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, more than 22,000 official delegates gathered to call for coherence between the three pillars of sustainable development — social justice, economic growth, and environmental protection. This section briefly examines the evolution of the concept of sustainable development and its prospects beyond the “Johannesburg Summit”.

Because of conflicting political, historic, and economic circumstances, there is an apparent difference between the communities of developing countries from those of their industrial counterparts. This is made evident through exploring the nature and framework of international environmental law, since there are significant discrepancies on to whom the responsibility of such issues is given, the measures to be taken, and the conditions of managing global environmental degradation. Despite such dissonance, there have already been several efforts for coming up with measures that would bridge the ideologies of both the developing and industrial states for establishing a common environmental agenda. However, such efforts are not without instances of normativity, ambiguities, and even uprisings. This chapter analyses, through observing the Stockholm, Rio, and Johannesburg international environmental conferences, how this dissonance has developed throughout history.

This chapter examines policies to improve urban water supply and sanitation in the poorest countries. Johannesburg provides the case study. The city is posed with the challenge of meeting ‘the pressing service needs of burgeoning numbers of historically disadvantaged urban dwellers, without compromising the standards of services and supply to better-off rate-paying citizens’. The limited ablution facilities, which are used by women and children as well as men, are associated with the worst humiliations of abject living conditions, such as lack of privacy, hygiene, and basic dignity. The case shows how the Johannesburg authority was trying to make the best of an inheritance of extreme inequality, as well as the unrealisable expectations of both the majority of the South African population and the international financial agencies.

This chapter begins with Esther's story, a woman residing in Nairobi who confronts convergent social and health conditions from food insecurity to diabetes, HIV, and financial stress. The story demonstrates how a global story of diabetes overlooks the unique social, political, and cultural factors that produce diabetes from place to place. The chapter positions the book within the anthropological literature on diabetes and social suffering and introduces the idea that diabetes is always "syndemic" – or convergent with social and health problems. The chapters suggests that social pathways link arduous life experiences with biological risk, revealing important psychophysiological pathways between social stress and metabolic distress. The chapter also introduces the book, a multi-method study of diabetes among low-income communities in the United States, India, South Africa, and Kenya.

Chapter Five, Soweto, centers upon Sibongile's story from Soweto, a historic collection of six clustered townships in Johannesburg, South Africa. Sibongile faces complex intersections of structural violence instituted by a legacy of apartheid and AIDS as well as personal insecurities in everyday life. Sibongile'snarrative demonstrates the powerful role of cultural and political histories in emergent realities of diabetes and how lived experiences shape and are shaped by her mental and physical health. For example, I unpack myriad forms of structural and interpersonal violence that become fundamental to illness experiences. I also discuss how social and financial demands placed upon women who care for AIDS-orphaned grandchildren require more than love and money for school fees. In many cases, women in Soweto, including Sibongile prioritized the needs of their family members above their personal needs, including the need to manage their diet and medicines for diabetes control. Moreover, in a context of HIV/AIDS stigma, Sibongile and others described how diabetes becomes consumed in a catch-all "chronic illness stigma" where people conflate their diabetes treatment needs with those associated with HIV.

This chapter takes a look at Rabbi Judah Leo Landau’s poem, ‘Ahavat yehonatan’. Landau was a Hebrew poet and one of the fathers of modern Hebrew drama. ‘Ahavat yehonatan’ is based on a folk tale about the life of King Jan Sobieski. It relates the story of how Jan Sobieski was abandoned as a young boy and then brought up in the home of the rich Jew Bezalel, the leader of the Jewish community. The poem opens with a powerful description of the dark and stormy night when the J Bezalel, walking alone through the deserted streets in the Jewish quarter, discovers Jonathan (Jan) lying weak and abandoned next to a Jewish home. This dramatic description, in the pseudo-biblical style of the Haskalah, is characteristic of Landau’s later work and demonstrates a remarkable lyricism.

This chapter charts the history of the Africana Museum from its founder’s death until its attainment of a permanent home in order to trace the museum’s transformation from a space structured around three-dimensional ideals to one that supported binaries. It is argued here that this metamorphosis turned the Africana Museum into an institution that actually supported the logic of racism and then apartheid. Further, it is revealed in this chapter that this conversion did not take place under the auspices of overtly racist bureaucracy. Rather, and ironically, the Africana Museum’s morphing into an engine for racist ends happened under the guise of liberalism. By detailing this process, this chapter demonstrates that there are limitations to liberalism’s ability to counter racism.

The chapter opens with a photo essay, recording a walk taken in Hillbrow with Phaswane Mpe, retracing the footsteps of the characters in his novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow. The discussion opens onto a reflection of a phenomenology of the city, and refers to two other very different novels, also set in Johannesburg: Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket. Each of the novels depicts a physical urban landscape that bears the traces of an immediate and absent past, yet in the moment of the characters’ recognition of features in the landscape that register buildings and people no longer there, the novels articulate a chiasmus of the visible and the invisible, the spatial and the temporal, drawing attention to the contingency of each cultural and political moment, challenging the reader through literary representation about what can be seen, and said, and thought.

This chapter traces the histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Despite historical differences, South Africa and Israel governed similar social formations during the second half of the 20th century. The chapter then presents an overview of the political and economic transformations that have restructured social relations in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last twenty years. In the early 1990s, both states responded to political-economic crises by neoliberalizing their racial capitalist economies and entering into negotiations over decolonization. While South Africa has been partially decolonized, Israel remains a settler colonial state. In both cases, however, the combination of neoliberalization and (de)colonization has produced extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies of securitization. The chapter ends by introducing the sites of my ethnographic research: the Johannesburg and Jerusalem metropolitan regions. The difference between Israel’s ongoing colonial project and the post-colonial project of the South African state are perhaps nowhere more evident than in these urban regions. Yet the landscapes of Johannesburg and Jerusalem are increasingly defined by the combination of marginalization and securitization.

This chapter explores the precariousness of life in a Black township in Johannesburg after apartheid. The chapter begins with a brief social history of Alexandra township before analyzing the transformation of Alexandra into a ghetto of exclusion for the increasingly expendable Black working class. As factories closed and the Black middle class moved out, Alexandra became a site of concentrated poverty, abandoned factories, and informal settlements. Confronting a dual crisis of housing and unemployment, the urban poor increasingly survive through informal economic and housing strategies. These strategies, however, have intensified the fragmentation of the community. The chapter then turns to the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), a major “urban renewal” project of the post-apartheid state. Analyzing the successes and failures of the ARP highlights the limits of decolonization in a context of commitments to private property and the ongoing devaluation of Black life. The chapter ends by discussing efforts to overcome fragmentation and social movements in Alexandra today.

In northern Johannesburg, the historically white neighborhoods around Sandton – just across the highway from Alexandra – have become laboratories for the development of advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing poor Black South Africans. This chapter begins with a discussion of crime and insecurity in South Africa and an overview of policing in post-apartheid South Africa. It then traces the fortification of elite neighborhoods through the construction of walled enclosures and the expansion of private security. Residents’ associations and private security companies work together to develop cutting edge security regimes for wealthy neighborhoods. The most sophisticated new strategies of preventative security rely on racial profiling to target young Black men. Yet networked strategies to produce security for the elite generate new tensions and rely on the labor of the same people that they target: poor Black men. This highlights the contradictions of securitization as well as the continuing value of surplus populations – both as a source of low-wage labor and as a symbolic threat fueling the expansion of private security industries and fortress suburbs.

This chapter argues that the work of Ivan Vladislavić offers a sophisticated response to the dangers of selective memory—and memorialization—that characterizes some responses to the disappointments of the ‘new’ South Africa. Using Svetlana Boym’s differentiation (in The Future of Nostalgia) between reflective and recuperative forms of nostalgia, the chapter considers the turn to nostalgia in South African letters, and places in that context the negotiation of a ‘critical nostalgia’ in representative work by Vladislavić—including ‘Propaganda by Monuments’, The Restless Supermarket (2001), Portrait with Keys (2006), and Double Negative (2010). It assesses the usefulness of Walter Benjamin’s work (including the ‘Theses’, Arcades Project, and ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay) for engaging with the affective politics and formal provocativeness of Vladislavić’s work, which balances past and future, disappointment and utopianism, a concern with this place and every place.