On the durability and the decomposition of citizenship: the social logics of forced return migration in Cape Verde

This article explores the impact of deportation, a state practice increasingly applied by European and North American governments, on notions of sociality in transnational social fields. In particular, it concentrates on the dynamics between formal citizenship on the one hand and the moral economies of belonging and membership on the other. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verde, where deportation is producing a new social minority, this article examines the confluence of social and formal legal practices of exercising membership in transnational fields. After summarising the constitutive features of Cape Verdean transnational social formation, the trajectories and perspectives of deportees are highlighted in relation to their family networks, as well as in their encounters with the wider society and state structures. It is argued that understandings of social inclusion and perceptions of membership are embedded in moral discourses on ‘law’ and ‘justice’ as they circulate within transnational social fields. In the context of forced return migration, citizenship emerges as an arena for claiming legitimacy and integration and likewise becomes a key mode of the formulation of conditionalities for integration and social exclusion.     

“Zimbabwe is Mine”: Mugabe,Murder, and Matabeleland

Searching for Sugar Man, the celebrated 2012 documentary of Sixto Rodriguez’s musical life, opens onto (but does not adequately address) important questions concerning musical circulation and reception. It is a story of two albums, Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971) that traveled in very different ways in the USA and South Africa and of how these travels were shaped by cultural politics and cultural circuits. But, it is also a story about the ways that the music industry complicated these cultural circuits by muddying and interrupting financial pathways—that is, by acting as a circuit breaker. Unfortunately, the film misses an opportunity to explore any of these stories in a sustained manner, crafting instead a narrative that engages them only to the extent that they help the director, Malik Bendjelloul, present a lost-and-found narrative of musical rebirth, featuring South African fans and audiences as the supporting cast. In choosing this entertaining, but myth-making path, the film itself configures new circuits and inaugurates additional circuit breakers that must be disentangled from and read in relation to Rodriguez’s musical life.     

Cartographies of Transformation in Mostar and Cape Town: Mapping as a Methodology in Divided Cities

ABSTRACT

All cities, as heterogenous spaces, are divided. However, conflict, in various forms can create cities which are monikered as ‘divided cities’. The divisions in these cities involve the segregation of communities and entrenchment of social and political divides. Through case studies situated in the spatially divided cities of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cape Town, South Africa, this article demonstrates local resistance to top-down divisions. Theoretically and methodologically, this article contributes an understanding of mapping as a methodology which can materialise the spatial agency of local actors and can contribute to more inclusive memory work and reconstruction.     

‘Walking in two worlds’: A qualitative review of income management in Cape York

The Cape York Welfare Reform (CYWR) initiative aims to reduce ‘passive dependence’ on welfare and restore ‘positive social norms’ to revitalise cultural and social networks and support economic engagement in Indigenous communities in the Cape York Region of Australia. Critics of the initiative and, in particular, its income management (IM) policies have associated it with a broader neoliberal reform agenda that delineates social ‘problems’ from their historical and structural context. This paper discusses key qualitative findings from a strategic review of CYWR, paying particular attention to the ways in which Cape York IM (CYIM) straddles both Indigenous and settler social norms, while perpetuating neoliberal conceptualisations of welfare ‘dependency’. We situate these findings within the existing literature on Australia's other IM models and also consider them in relation to subsequent government responses to the review and associated policies. We argue that CYIM represents a unique initiative, the subtle nuances of which have been largely ignored or misunderstood by critics. Further, we conclude that any extension or revision of this initiative should be considered with respect to deep and wide-ranging consultation of the Indigenous communities subject to CYWR. However, such consultation has not been the standard practice in Australian contexts.     

关于激发基层工会工作活力的思考 一以江阴市新桥镇工会工作为例

基层工会组织是中因工会组织的重要组成部分,基层工会工作的开展直接关系到工会整体工作水平。激 发基层工会工作活力对于推动工会事业的发展有着重要的影响作用。多年来,江苏省江阴市新桥镇总工会坚持走出了 一条创新发展之路,积累了宝贵的工作经验,其各项工作具有典型的“多维度”特征。这一特征为激发基层工会工作 活力提供了对策建议。如果职工都愿意将自己的发展与工会的发展紧紧连在一起,这样的工会组织就一定充满了活力。     

上虞区青年网商创业瓶颈与发展分析

文章分析了汤浦镇电商园区中青年网商的创业现状,对当前上虞区青年网商发展遇到的瓶颈问题进行了深层次的原因分析,提出了加强对电子商务的宣传力度、青年网商的金融服务和青年网商的业务培训等几方面的思考.     

Horizons of long-distance intimacies

This article employs the renewed anthropology of kinship to revisit historical approaches to the study of social relations taking place in transnational social fields. Based on multi-sited qualitative anthropological fieldwork with a strong historical perspective centred on biographical interviews and social network analysis, the author examines a particular Cape Verdean household that comprises four generations and extends its contacts between several Cape Verdean islands, Portugal, São Tomé/Príncipe as well as the United States. The contextualization of the individual life courses of its members and their changing relatedness in the course of time brings to surface a complex design of factors that contribute to the sense of belonging or detachment in this Creole transnational island society. These are different levels of mobility, the challenges and limits of diverse levels of technical connectivity between several localities, the dynamics between approved relatedness and family-based migration regimes as well as the normative aspects resulting in a gendered perspective on the demands of reciprocity. The author introduces the notion of a “contributive family model” in order to capture the individual choice of keeping in touch and the meaning of social practices, which transform ideas of relatedness into reconfirmed transnational solidarities.     

Knowledge production and the construction of ‘Africa(ns)’ in the Caribbean

Abstract

There is a considerable lack of awareness of the interrelated nature of human activities due to insufficient information. A community without relevant information or public sensitivity to participation, in fostering a sense of personal environmental responsibility and greater motivation towards achieving personal goals, becomes problematic. Using the poststructuralist theory, this article takes a qualitative approach to analyse discourses and people's reaction to an ‘insecure’ environment within South African communities. It examines organisations which provide support to empower communities through education in Cape Town. One assumption here is that people gain knowledge about themselves, their environment and others around them, if they are empowered. The focus thus is on educational schemes and activities that communities and organisations undertake to challenge, accept and negotiate their ideological positions. The inventiveness and responses of the organisations considered, through the local communities and pupils, are therefore significant as they enable an understanding of the challenges encountered in democratic South Africa, including the causes of xenophobia. Ultimately, the consequences of ignorance about one's environment are detrimental to both neighbouring communities and people at large. The local communities considered expressed this sentiment while implicating the government's role in depriving its people of vital socio-cultural and politico-economic information.     

The Entropy of Built Things: Postapartheid Anxiety and the Production of Space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City

Two recent novels reveal two interrelated clusters of postapartheid anxiety in twenty-first-century South Africa: one type is a dread of invasion, contamination, infestation, and other encroachments of the new, alien, and other. A second set of preoccupations involves subterranean spaces—basements, mines, tunnels—and a distrust of the solidity of built environments. Both Nineveh and Zoo City strip away the surface layers of Cape Town and Johannesburg and show us the layers of infrastructure, mechanization, and human labor that constitute or produce the city itself. But the two novels show us different understandings of the urban “underneath”: Beukes’ imagined Johannesburg is one in which spatial inequalities that seem chaotic, in fact structure the city and allow for social regimentation, while Rose-Innes shows us a Cape Town where spatial structures and entrenched inequality appear to be designed to ward off the intrinsic “entropy of built things.”     

African women and the wars of resistance and dispossession in the Cape Colony and Xhosaland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

ABSTRACT

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial wars in the Cape Colony and trans-Keian territories in South Africa are usually represented as conflicts primarily involving male antagonists. The roles and experiences of indigenous women are usually overlooked or, at best, mentioned in passing. Closer examination of the wars that took place in what is now the Eastern Cape province of South Africa suggests that women were deeply affected by the various wars in a multitude of ways. They experienced first-hand death, disruption of their families and society, destruction of their homesteads and crops, and the looting of their livestock and other resources and were seized for forced labor. In the midst of the conflict, they developed different strategies to mitigate the effects of the wars and to survive, playing an active role in the wars as leaders, emissaries, and war doctors and in providing intelligence and commissariat support.