Rethinking resilience: South Africa and self-reliance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article, as the introduction to the Rethinking Resilience special issue, lays out the political and historical terrain of thinking with resilience, from South Africa, in 2021. It outlines the urgencies of the current moment, while delving into how the use of “resilience” has been adapted from scientific disciplines into various fields and broader popular culture. We discuss the two primary interlinking and overlapping themes of Rethinking Resilience: resilience as a historical and contemporary governance discourse with consequences and implications; and resilience as a concept tied to the Anthropocene along with the material properties of matter. As colonial and apartheid histories reveal, certain parts of the population have always been assumed to have more resilience than others, demonstrating how, in the present day, it is marginalised communities who are tasked with being resilient in order to survive. It is this assumption that the black gendered body has an innate natural facility to overcome all obstacles that also resonates with anthropocentric thinking. Through discussing these two overlapping themes, this special issue introduction shows how we bring together work that reveals the slippages in resilience, highlighting how the different uses and meanings of resilience can be productive