Cinema of social recuperation: Xenophobic violence and migrant subjectivity in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

It is tempting to read recent xenophobic violence in South Africa as simply symptomatic of the extent to which non-citizens have been reduced to ‘bare life’, a condition characterised by the expulsion of a person from the order of socially valued existence and the subjection of that person to the vagaries of sovereign power. Although the category of homo sacer does shed some light on the condition of statelessness that leaves foreign migrants ‘stripped of their identity as legal beings’, it also risks misrecognising the lived, embodied complexity of migrant subjectivity. Through a reading of Adze Ugah's The Burning Man, a documentary film about the Mozambican man who was burned alive on 17 May 2008 as a result of xenophobic riots in South Africa, this article highlights some of the concrete, everyday social and affective networks that give migrant lives their unique subjective integrity.