Precarious Liberation : Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (362 pages)
- SUNY Series in Global Modernity Series .
- SUNY Series in Global Modernity Series .
Precarious Liberation -- Precarious Liberation -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Note on South Africa's Racial Terminology -- Introduction -- The Promise of Wage Labor in South Africa's Democratization -- The Nexus of Work and Social Citizenship as a Contested Field of Signification -- Work and Citizenship in Postcolonial and Postapartheid Modernity -- Conclusion and Summary of Chapters -- 1. Redeeming Labor: From the Racial State to National Liberation -- Introduction -- "Schooling Bodies to Hard Work": Labor, Modernity, and the Policy Discourse of the Racial State -- The Hopes and Disappointments of an Inclusive South Africanism -- Apartheid Social Engineering and the Coercive Enforcement of Wage Labor Discipline -- Black Workers' Struggles and the Redemption of Wage Labor, 1973-1994 -- Conclusion -- 2. The Work-Citizenship Nexus of Postapartheid South Africa -- Resistance Is Futile: The Governance Project of the ANC in the "New South Africa" -- The Changing Face of Precariousness -- Building the Patriotic Worker: The Democratic Constitutionalization of Wage Labor -- Conclusion: Disciplining Citizenship -- 3. Contesting Commodification: Social Policy Debates in the Crisis of Waged Employment -- Introduction: Governing in the Shadow of Precariousness -- Social Policy as a Technology of Self-Responsibility -- "Laudable Citizens" and "Silly Fools": Work, Families, and the Developmental Social Welfare Idea -- "The Wage-Income Relationship Is Breaking Down": Basic Income and Contested Decommodification -- Conclusion: Precarious Employment as the New "People's Contract"? -- 4. The Changing World of Work in Gauteng -- Introduction: Dreaming of Modernity in the "Place of Gold" -- City of Industry: The East Rand/Ekurhuleni and the Promise of Work -- Economic Restructuring and Employment Decline: The East Rand in Transition. Johannesburg Municipal Workers and the Corporatization of Local Service Delivery -- Conclusion: Invisible Workers and the Discursive Production of Postapartheid Spaces -- 5. Translation Troubles: Signifying Precarious Work on the Shop Floor -- Introduction -- Coping with "Something Strange": The Disappointments of Workplace Transformation in East Rand Factories -- New Canaan, New Egypt: Workplace, Community, and Identity among Johannesburg Municipal Workers -- "We Feel Sort of Redundant": Surviving the Flexible Workplace -- Entrepreneurs of the Self: Individual Strategies and Life after Waged Employment -- Conclusion -- 6. "Like a Branch on a Rotten Tree": Recovering Agency after Wage Labor -- Introduction -- Commodification and the Reconfiguration of Workers' Lives -- A Future Unlike It Used to Be: Visions of the Apocalypse and Labor's Politics of Melancholia -- The Fog of Activism: Working-Class Agency and the Uncertain Quest for Citizenship Alternatives -- Conclusion -- Conclusion -- Appendix on Methodology -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Examines the relationship of precarious employment to state policies on citizenship and social inclusion in the context of postapartheid South Africa.