Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Combining richly detailed empirical research on transnational connections with bold and imaginative theoretical argument, this innovative study offers fresh critical understandings of globalization and unique insights into post-apartheid South Africa. Based on research conducted between 1994 and 2001, Gillian Hart traces political dynamics in two former white towns and adjacent black townships in the province of KwaZulu-Natal that are major sites of Taiwanese investment. Focusing on East Asian connections with these places, and on histories and memories of racialized dispossession, she highlights the fragility of the neoliberal project in post-apartheid South Africa. She also suggests how rethinking the land question in terms of a social wage could connect a variety of ongoing struggles. Hart provides a clear sense of how and why both popular and academic discourses of globalization are so deeply disabling. Readers will come away with more politically empowering understandings of social change in an increasingly interconnected world.