Pub Date : 2022-11-29DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2133735
Johanna von Pezold
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique (in 2017 and 2019) and China (in 2019), this paper looks at the ways that Chinese garments and textiles are presented and promoted as being fashionable in everyday business interactions in Mozambique. It explores how fashion is mediated in informal, South–South contexts that are largely detached from Euro–American fashion systems. Several different groups make use of their own specific strengths and advantages – be it access to capital and networks, long-term trading experience, business expertise, or an intimate knowledge of local tastes and trends – to sell Chinese-made clothes, shoes, and fabrics in Mozambique. These groups include Indian traders, West African individual traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, Chinese textile companies, and since recently, young Mozambicans, including women, who see the availability and affordability of Chinese-made products as an opportunity to start their own businesses. These diverse actors partly complement and partly contradict each other in mediating the fashionability of Chinese-made products, while jointly constructing them as fashion. Through this unintentional co-construction, the groups selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique carve out market niches for themselves, stimulate local dress culture, and diversify the way fashion mediation is understood, adding a South–South perspective to it.
{"title":"Co-constructing fashion in a South–South context: selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique","authors":"Johanna von Pezold","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2133735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2133735","url":null,"abstract":"Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique (in 2017 and 2019) and China (in 2019), this paper looks at the ways that Chinese garments and textiles are presented and promoted as being fashionable in everyday business interactions in Mozambique. It explores how fashion is mediated in informal, South–South contexts that are largely detached from Euro–American fashion systems. Several different groups make use of their own specific strengths and advantages – be it access to capital and networks, long-term trading experience, business expertise, or an intimate knowledge of local tastes and trends – to sell Chinese-made clothes, shoes, and fabrics in Mozambique. These groups include Indian traders, West African individual traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, Chinese textile companies, and since recently, young Mozambicans, including women, who see the availability and affordability of Chinese-made products as an opportunity to start their own businesses. These diverse actors partly complement and partly contradict each other in mediating the fashionability of Chinese-made products, while jointly constructing them as fashion. Through this unintentional co-construction, the groups selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique carve out market niches for themselves, stimulate local dress culture, and diversify the way fashion mediation is understood, adding a South–South perspective to it.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"73 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78881543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-28DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2133734
K. Chinyowa, Nalini Moodley-Diar, Anre Fourie
Popular arts are not only accessible to most people, but their stylistic features are also a crucial scholarly site of attention. Liz Gunner [1990. “Introduction: Forms of Popular Culture and the Struggle for Space.” Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (2): 199–206] regards African popular art as an empowering agency that can give people a new sense of control over their own lives. Through processes of improvisation, enactment and dialogue, such popular arts create spaces for participants to not only express themselves, but also to exercise power and authority over forces of oppression and repression. In African storytelling the trickster narrative is one of the aesthetic categories and is indeed the trope from which popular theatre in Africa has derived most of its inspiration. Using the illustrative paradigm of a popular theatre performance entitled, Vana Vana (Children are children), this article seeks to demonstrate how symbolic inversion was used to address topical issues associated with child abuse in Zimbabwe. The performance focuses on the violation of children’s rights through child labour, domestic violence, sexual abuse, child soldiers and ‘street children.’ The article examines these forms of child abuse to see how Vana Vana operates as a performative discourse that deploys trickster narrative to critique actual violations of children’s rights. The article also examines the agentive power of the young theatre facilitators and performers who were at the centre of devising the popular theatre performance through symbolic inversion. What the paper demonstrates, then, is a classic example of the performative power of popular youth theatre and its agency to critique and hold accountable a dominant culture that endangers the lives and futures of young people.
{"title":"The agentive power of play in theatre for young people: a Zimbabwean case study","authors":"K. Chinyowa, Nalini Moodley-Diar, Anre Fourie","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2133734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2133734","url":null,"abstract":"Popular arts are not only accessible to most people, but their stylistic features are also a crucial scholarly site of attention. Liz Gunner [1990. “Introduction: Forms of Popular Culture and the Struggle for Space.” Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (2): 199–206] regards African popular art as an empowering agency that can give people a new sense of control over their own lives. Through processes of improvisation, enactment and dialogue, such popular arts create spaces for participants to not only express themselves, but also to exercise power and authority over forces of oppression and repression. In African storytelling the trickster narrative is one of the aesthetic categories and is indeed the trope from which popular theatre in Africa has derived most of its inspiration. Using the illustrative paradigm of a popular theatre performance entitled, Vana Vana (Children are children), this article seeks to demonstrate how symbolic inversion was used to address topical issues associated with child abuse in Zimbabwe. The performance focuses on the violation of children’s rights through child labour, domestic violence, sexual abuse, child soldiers and ‘street children.’ The article examines these forms of child abuse to see how Vana Vana operates as a performative discourse that deploys trickster narrative to critique actual violations of children’s rights. The article also examines the agentive power of the young theatre facilitators and performers who were at the centre of devising the popular theatre performance through symbolic inversion. What the paper demonstrates, then, is a classic example of the performative power of popular youth theatre and its agency to critique and hold accountable a dominant culture that endangers the lives and futures of young people.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"117 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89123135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-28DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2133732
Bettina Engels
{"title":"Income opportunities for many or development through state revenues? Contested narratives on mining","authors":"Bettina Engels","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2133732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2133732","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79365771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2145978
S. Andemariam
In 1994, with the establishment of the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice as Eritrea’s sole political party, the government of Eritrea proclaimed a bold new economic policy to create a private sector-led, export-oriented, free market economy. This appeared to be a marked departure from Eritrean political elites’ prior Marxist-Leninism and commitment to isolationist, state-led development. However, we argue that this new policy, rather than evidence of ideological vacuity, was consistent with a deeper set of ideological principles. This ideology assigns a pre-eminent role to the society's political elite, valorises almost autarkic economic independence, and reproduces a specific variant of radical ‘high’ modernism through mass mobilisation and root-and-branch transformation. However, in contrast to past high modernist development ideologies, Eritrea’s particular constellation of policies is part of a new pattern of illiberal modernisation ideology visible across a number of countries in 21st Century Africa, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia. We trace Eritrea’s history of adherence to international self-reliance and societal dominance through the long years of insurgent struggle that led to the establishment of the government of liberated Eritrea. This reveals how ideology is indispensable in understanding the state and policymaking and how particular political ideas constitute key defining influences on the Eritrean state.
{"title":"Modernisation in isolation: the nature and roots of Eritrea’s defining economic ideology","authors":"S. Andemariam","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2145978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2145978","url":null,"abstract":"In 1994, with the establishment of the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice as Eritrea’s sole political party, the government of Eritrea proclaimed a bold new economic policy to create a private sector-led, export-oriented, free market economy. This appeared to be a marked departure from Eritrean political elites’ prior Marxist-Leninism and commitment to isolationist, state-led development. However, we argue that this new policy, rather than evidence of ideological vacuity, was consistent with a deeper set of ideological principles. This ideology assigns a pre-eminent role to the society's political elite, valorises almost autarkic economic independence, and reproduces a specific variant of radical ‘high’ modernism through mass mobilisation and root-and-branch transformation. However, in contrast to past high modernist development ideologies, Eritrea’s particular constellation of policies is part of a new pattern of illiberal modernisation ideology visible across a number of countries in 21st Century Africa, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia. We trace Eritrea’s history of adherence to international self-reliance and societal dominance through the long years of insurgent struggle that led to the establishment of the government of liberated Eritrea. This reveals how ideology is indispensable in understanding the state and policymaking and how particular political ideas constitute key defining influences on the Eritrean state.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"293 - 310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80171193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2151482
B. Dye
The 21st century has seen a major political and developmental shift in Africa involving the rise of new authoritarian states and a return to infrastructure-led, economically interventionist state-building programmes. Many studies have examined the international political economy of this shift, from the commodity boom to the rise of China and the political power underpinning development-focused regimes at the national level. This special issue argues instead that this authoritarian state-building drive is also the product of ideas, beliefs, and principles. An ideology of development has led a group of ruling parties to pursue distinctive programmes of leap-frogging modernization. Authors in this special issue present a set of case studies ranging from old parties in government since independence, in Tanzania and Mozambique, to former insurgents in Rwanda and Ethiopia, and detail their ideologies. While acknowledging their considerable variation and uniqueness, we group the common features of these cases together, presenting the ‘illiberal modernisers’ ideological programme. Many of its elements look like resurgent 20th-century High Modernism, however, we demonstrate that there are profoundly new features combining postmodern aesthetics, elements of neoliberal orthodoxy, and new public management. Such ideological dimensions remain overlooked in the study of African politics, with materialist perspectives touting rational interests and strategy, largely dominating.
{"title":"Introduction: The ideology of the illiberal modernisers in Africa","authors":"B. Dye","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2151482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2151482","url":null,"abstract":"The 21st century has seen a major political and developmental shift in Africa involving the rise of new authoritarian states and a return to infrastructure-led, economically interventionist state-building programmes. Many studies have examined the international political economy of this shift, from the commodity boom to the rise of China and the political power underpinning development-focused regimes at the national level. This special issue argues instead that this authoritarian state-building drive is also the product of ideas, beliefs, and principles. An ideology of development has led a group of ruling parties to pursue distinctive programmes of leap-frogging modernization. Authors in this special issue present a set of case studies ranging from old parties in government since independence, in Tanzania and Mozambique, to former insurgents in Rwanda and Ethiopia, and detail their ideologies. While acknowledging their considerable variation and uniqueness, we group the common features of these cases together, presenting the ‘illiberal modernisers’ ideological programme. Many of its elements look like resurgent 20th-century High Modernism, however, we demonstrate that there are profoundly new features combining postmodern aesthetics, elements of neoliberal orthodoxy, and new public management. Such ideological dimensions remain overlooked in the study of African politics, with materialist perspectives touting rational interests and strategy, largely dominating.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"219 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84380027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-24DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2074482
B. Dye
Globally, and especially in Africa, twentieth-century dams were typically imagined through high modernist ideology as the premier development project, but this ended with the decade-long hiatus in dam construction from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. However, dam-building is back. Does this mark the resurgence of a modernising ideology, of grand plans of mega-infrastructures implemented from an enlightened vanguard? This article analyses this question using Rwanda and Tanzania as case studies. It makes a twofold contribution. The first, to the literature on why the resurgence of dams is happening. Using theory, it shows how to understand the influence of ideology alongside other strategic factors and conceptualises the application of high modernism to dam building. This allows a more precise assessment of the influence of ideology on dam resurgence, with the cases of Rwanda and Tanzania demonstrating significant contrasts with past tendencies to aggrandise the infrastructure itself as the harbinger of progress. The second contribution to this special issue is on the ideology influencing a raft of 21st century illiberal states in Africa that have embarked on grand development missions. The article compliments other texts in this issue, demonstrating the presence of an evolved illiberal modernisers ideology that combines tenants of the past with more recent norms. Thus, an assumption of technologies’ ability to linearly generate development is combined with contrasting ideas about sustainability, the importance of the private sector’s role and hydropower’s limitations. This demonstrates the way today’s illiberal modernisers, engaged in global debates, adapt and update development ideology.
{"title":"Dam building by the illiberal modernisers: ideological drivers for Rwanda and Tanzania’s megawatt mission","authors":"B. Dye","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2074482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2074482","url":null,"abstract":"Globally, and especially in Africa, twentieth-century dams were typically imagined through high modernist ideology as the premier development project, but this ended with the decade-long hiatus in dam construction from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. However, dam-building is back. Does this mark the resurgence of a modernising ideology, of grand plans of mega-infrastructures implemented from an enlightened vanguard? This article analyses this question using Rwanda and Tanzania as case studies. It makes a twofold contribution. The first, to the literature on why the resurgence of dams is happening. Using theory, it shows how to understand the influence of ideology alongside other strategic factors and conceptualises the application of high modernism to dam building. This allows a more precise assessment of the influence of ideology on dam resurgence, with the cases of Rwanda and Tanzania demonstrating significant contrasts with past tendencies to aggrandise the infrastructure itself as the harbinger of progress. The second contribution to this special issue is on the ideology influencing a raft of 21st century illiberal states in Africa that have embarked on grand development missions. The article compliments other texts in this issue, demonstrating the presence of an evolved illiberal modernisers ideology that combines tenants of the past with more recent norms. Thus, an assumption of technologies’ ability to linearly generate development is combined with contrasting ideas about sustainability, the importance of the private sector’s role and hydropower’s limitations. This demonstrates the way today’s illiberal modernisers, engaged in global debates, adapt and update development ideology.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"231 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72718617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2082993
Monique Kwachou
{"title":"How a Cameroonian university is unintentionally producing African feminists, and why it must be more intentional","authors":"Monique Kwachou","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2082993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2082993","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89570673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-21DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2074484
Chloé Buire
In Luanda maybe more than elsewhere, controlling the city landscape is synonymous with controlling the polity at large. Despite a tremendous political change in Angola during the twentieth century, the paper traces how the modernist plans elaborated in the late colonial period (1945–1975) have influenced the planning imagination of Luanda until today. It argues that the construction boom that reshaped Luanda at the end of the war in 2002 can be interpreted as a modernist promise to break the middle class free from a hopeless urban fabric by promoting a specific urban aesthetic rather than facilitating social transformation. These continuities are, however, complex and fragile. What happens when the utopia of a city under control starts to lose power? Reflecting on two urban projects built around half a century apart, this paper explores how the kinesthetic experience of the city might constitute an unexpected form of ideological dissent able to disrupt modernism at large. The trajectory of Kilamba City, in particular, is the epitome of the oil-fed reconstruction frenzy of the late 2000s that brutally ended in 2014. Looking at how residents, planners and even state media relate to this project suggests that the unsustainability of a utopian suburban life eventually triggers new political subjectivities and directly challenges the modernist ideology that endured for so long.
{"title":"Crumbling modernisms: Luanda architectonic utopias after the boom","authors":"Chloé Buire","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2074484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2074484","url":null,"abstract":"In Luanda maybe more than elsewhere, controlling the city landscape is synonymous with controlling the polity at large. Despite a tremendous political change in Angola during the twentieth century, the paper traces how the modernist plans elaborated in the late colonial period (1945–1975) have influenced the planning imagination of Luanda until today. It argues that the construction boom that reshaped Luanda at the end of the war in 2002 can be interpreted as a modernist promise to break the middle class free from a hopeless urban fabric by promoting a specific urban aesthetic rather than facilitating social transformation. These continuities are, however, complex and fragile. What happens when the utopia of a city under control starts to lose power? Reflecting on two urban projects built around half a century apart, this paper explores how the kinesthetic experience of the city might constitute an unexpected form of ideological dissent able to disrupt modernism at large. The trajectory of Kilamba City, in particular, is the epitome of the oil-fed reconstruction frenzy of the late 2000s that brutally ended in 2014. Looking at how residents, planners and even state media relate to this project suggests that the unsustainability of a utopian suburban life eventually triggers new political subjectivities and directly challenges the modernist ideology that endured for so long.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"81 1","pages":"274 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83388808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-26DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2076705
L. Puddu
Large scale agricultural projects driven by a high modernist ideology have been closely interlinked with the process of state building at the Ethiopian lowland frontier since the second half of the twentieth century. This paper provides a diachronic analysis of the political economy of agricultural development and the associated frontier effect in the western and north-eastern lowlands of the country across three different political regimes. A comparative assessment of these patterns suggests that the high modernist paradigm should be applied with some qualification to the agenda of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1994 to 2019. The EPRDF was far more pragmatic than its predecessors; the oscillation between different degrees of state intervention was based upon past experiences of success and failure in the territorialization of state power in contested borderlands.
{"title":"A pragmatic high modernism? rural development and state building in the Ethiopian lowlands, c. 1960–2019.","authors":"L. Puddu","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2076705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2076705","url":null,"abstract":"Large scale agricultural projects driven by a high modernist ideology have been closely interlinked with the process of state building at the Ethiopian lowland frontier since the second half of the twentieth century. This paper provides a diachronic analysis of the political economy of agricultural development and the associated frontier effect in the western and north-eastern lowlands of the country across three different political regimes. A comparative assessment of these patterns suggests that the high modernist paradigm should be applied with some qualification to the agenda of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1994 to 2019. The EPRDF was far more pragmatic than its predecessors; the oscillation between different degrees of state intervention was based upon past experiences of success and failure in the territorialization of state power in contested borderlands.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"311 - 329"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76436503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2022.2074485
M. Makgoba
This paper investigates how the South African government and mining corporations have appropriated anti-apartheid and anti-colonial discourses to legitimise Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy without being transformative in conception, discourse, or action. There is a presumption in academic circles that BEE is a panacea for radically transforming historical, structural, and unequal power relations in South Africa. This article rejects this presumption by demonstrating how the conception and discourse of BEE have ignored these power relations and their underlying political economic structures of apartheid capitalism even before the policy was implemented or enforced by the government. Using [Young, Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press] critique of the distributive paradigm of justice, and employing [Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press] three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article argues that the government and mining corporations present BEE as a new measure of radical transformation while simultaneously reducing this transformation to the micro concept of economic participation, focusing on numbers, representation, and targets rather than on historical, structural, and unequal power relations. As a result, the government and these corporations have reinforced and maintained these power relations while employing the discourse of BEE to masquerade as advancing their transformation. The crux is that BEE encourages Black people to operate within economically and institutionally oppressive structures which amplify the conditions they purport to be challenging.
{"title":"Constructing Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy in South Africa: government v corporate discourse","authors":"M. Makgoba","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2074485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2074485","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates how the South African government and mining corporations have appropriated anti-apartheid and anti-colonial discourses to legitimise Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy without being transformative in conception, discourse, or action. There is a presumption in academic circles that BEE is a panacea for radically transforming historical, structural, and unequal power relations in South Africa. This article rejects this presumption by demonstrating how the conception and discourse of BEE have ignored these power relations and their underlying political economic structures of apartheid capitalism even before the policy was implemented or enforced by the government. Using [Young, Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press] critique of the distributive paradigm of justice, and employing [Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press] three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article argues that the government and mining corporations present BEE as a new measure of radical transformation while simultaneously reducing this transformation to the micro concept of economic participation, focusing on numbers, representation, and targets rather than on historical, structural, and unequal power relations. As a result, the government and these corporations have reinforced and maintained these power relations while employing the discourse of BEE to masquerade as advancing their transformation. The crux is that BEE encourages Black people to operate within economically and institutionally oppressive structures which amplify the conditions they purport to be challenging.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":"58 1","pages":"199 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76200460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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