Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa
Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa
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Abstract
This book explores how the values that underpin Western liberal democracy are contested and resisted in contemporary South Africa. During the 1980s, migrant workers from rural Zululand attempted to sabotage the revolution that was being led by the urban-based African National Congress (ANC), igniting a civil war that claimed thousands of lives. While the violence of that period has largely subsided, migrants continue to express discontent with the ANC government, which they articulate as a critique of liberal democracy itself. Migrants claim that democracy undermines the moral order that is crucial to good fortune and social reproduction in their rural homesteads—a fear that has heightened as neoliberalism renders family livelihoods ever more precarious. This antiliberal stance must be understood in the context of colonial governance in KwaZulu-Natal, which manipulated social differences between urban and rural areas. These differences continue to inform popular politics in the region today, particularly for migrant workers, who link their critique of democracy to a disapproval of the social forms that characterize contemporary urbanism. This study provides grist for a number of broader theoretical discussions. By paying attention to subaltern perspectives on democratization, it compels us to question common assumptions about the nature of liberal freedom and the forms of personhood that it seeks to produce. It also pushes us to rethink the social-scientific theories that seek to explain antiliberal politics, which rely on the very same assumptions that underpin the project of liberal democracy itself.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
The Question of Freedom
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1
A Divided Revolution
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2
The Habitus of the Homestead
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3
Urban Social Engineering and Revolutionary Consciousness
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4
Neoliberalism as Misfortune
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5
Death in an Age of Wild Ghosts
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6
Colonial Nostalgias and the Reinvention of Culture
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Conclusion
On the Politics of Culture
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End Matter
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