The Nation, its populations and their re-calibration: South African affirmative action in a neoliberal age

Abstract

Studies of affirmative action in South Africa generally pay attention to its successes and failures in particular sectors of the economy and at various levels of the social division of labour. This article situates the outcomes of affirmative action at the nexus of a series of contradictory processes: (a) increased wealth concentration among a few South Africans concurrent with growing local struggles among the poor about social exclusion from basic rights; (b) occlusions produced by neoliberal globalisation, narrow African nationalism and injunctions to forget about ‘race’ and (c) the logics of debt inherent in neoliberalism, affirmative action and worn nationalism. This examination of the convergence of affirmative action with intensified neoliberal macroeconomic policies at South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy shows that affirmative action in post-1994 South Africa is about the state’s re-calibration of ‘populations of privilege’ and ‘populations of need’. These adjustments have meant a re-articulation of ‘race’, class, nation and meanings of liberation that sparks contestations of affirmative action from both its beneficiaries and its ‘victims’. When situated within this global and local matrix, these reconfigurations of power, domination and exclusion reveal post-colonial iterations of both the ‘ethnographic state’ and the well-worn statecraft of divide and rule.