Students’ Bodily Carvings in School Spaces of the Post-Apartheid City

Abstract

The (post)-colonized person is a living, talking, conscious, active individual whose identity arises from a three-pronged movement of violation, erasure and self-writing. (Mbembe, 2006, p. 3) This article is an account of the school-going subject who moves across the post-apartheid city in search of viable educational circumstances. It presents one way of apprehending the dynamic interaction between the rapidly reconfiguring city and young people's exercise of school choice in it. Poor Black children are the focus of this account; specifically their ability to navigate rewired urban space and, in the process, transacting feasible lives in the light of desperate urban living. It is the main argument of this article that they do so largely in parallel to the normative school choice discourses--unrecognised and undervalued by their urban schools. The notion 'bodies in space' is apposite to capture the complex ways in which these children go about accessing the city and its schools. However, in spite of these precarious bodily carvings, the extant formal discourses of the city are oblivious to the ontological presence of the Black Other, in the form of these school-going children. Their mobile subject making in the city remain an invisible presence, with consequences for what the city is able to recognize and the schools (in)ability to offer genuinely inclusive institutional cultures. I suggest that these children carve out aspirant bodily dispositions while actively engaging their city's social and educational infrastructures. The view of the 'body as infrastructure' (see Simone, 2008) is given prominence in exploring their urban bodily adaptations. This article contributes to a nascent body of work that attempts to bring the submerged worlds of the Black urban under-classes in the South African city to academic consciousness. Nuttall and Mbembe's (2008) edited collection on the city of Johannesburg, which they conceptualise as an 'elusive metropolis,' does much to recuperate a form of scholarship that punctures functionalist readings of cities. Their work sets out an interrogation of Africa as a sign of modern social formation, based on a gesture of defamiliarization, and a commitment to providing a sense of the worldliness of contemporary African forms. Life forms in the 'Afropolitan' city, they suggest, involve connections among various forms of circulation--people, capital, finance, images--and overlapping spaces and times. Writing about the worldliness of the contemporary African city requires a profound interrogation of Africa in general and as a sign in modern formulations of knowledge. The elusive metropolis is juxtaposed with the global city paradigm's (see Sassen, 2001) emphasis on economic and technological global integration. The global city paradigm could be viewed as a highly functionalist reading of the city, as well as ignoring the specificity of cities of the global south. An analytically richer notion of the global city would account for what Appadurai (196) describes as urban that are now constituted by complex, overlapping, disjunctive, order of multiple centres, peripheries, and scapes of various scales, moving at various speeds (p.32). Mbembe and Nuttall (2008, p. 3) point out that the major cities of the global South share many of the characteristics of northern cities but that ways of seeing and reading African cities, for example, are still dominated by the metanarratives of urbanization, modernization, and crisis. They call for an analytical frame that captures the fracturing, colliding and splintered orders of urban life (p. 5), in other words, views that move beyond the misery associated with urban poverty, to richer, more nuanced accounts of the uncertain, spectral and informal quality of life, understood as elusive yet momentarily 'mappable.' Beyond the fact of urban poverty, this type of analysis is interested in the complex ways the 'terms of recognition' the ability and capacity of the poor to exercise their voice is pursued and substantiated (see Appadurai, 2004). …