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Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Oral Presentation Session
Melissa Wrapp
University of California, Irvine
As public debate around land reform intensifies in South Africa, there is growing recognition of the need to redress not only inequities in rural land ownership, but also the problem of spatial apartheid in urban areas. For decades, activists and civic associations have advocated for municipalities to transfer ownership of township rental properties built in the apartheid era to tenants. This paper follows the work of residents and activist groups in contemporary Cape Town, many of whom were involved in anti-apartheid organizing, who are now mediating home ownership disputes and advocating for municipal title transfer. I ask: What does it mean for revolutionary socialist activists to campaign for the privatization of state-owned property? In the paper, I explore this apparent contradiction through probing these activists’ uneasy alignment with neoliberal, de Sotoian logics of privatization. This analysis will facilitate a broader reflection on the way that socialist politics persist and permutate in changing political climates. Finally, I explore the experience of maintaining a socialist, oppositional politics in the context of Rainbow Nationalism, or as Lauren Berlant put it (1999), a time when “feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph.”