Defiant citizenship: marginality, race, and the struggle for place in Hangberg, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the rise of ‘defiant citizenship’ in Hangberg, a historic fishing village set on the lower slopes of the Sentinel Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. Defiant citizenship affirms membership of the state, but on terms that assert the primacy of residents’ right of belonging in, and sovereignty over, the place of Hangberg, even against the will of the state. This form of citizenship is rooted in long-standing experience of racial, economic and cultural marginality, deep disappointment with the post-apartheid order, and a strong attachment to local place.The defiant citizenship of Hangberg is explained by national and local, as well as international, dynamics. International dynamics centre on the precarity of tenure linked to the neo-liberalisation of property relations. National dynamics centre on perceptions of enduring and systemic racial exclusion from the post-apartheid order, and local dynamics refer to a history of local place-making associated with the environment of the sea and the mountain. We show how residents of Hangberg have constructed a new form of political subjectivity from a marginal and racialised position that disrupts citizen/foreigner notions of inclusion and exclusion, and reclaims marginality through implicit and explicit appeals to belonging and local sovereignty of place.