This is a compelling study of the origins and trajectory of a legendary black uprising against apartheid - the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986. Using insights from the literature on collective action and social movements, it delves deep into the rebellion's inner workings. It examines how the residents of Alexandra - a poverty-stricken, segregated township in Johannesburg - manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time and power in their sequestered world; how they used political theatre to convey, stage and dramatise their struggle; and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics. Theatres of Struggle asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels, and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones.
This is a compelling study of the origins and trajectory of a legendary black uprising against apartheid - the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986. Using insights from the literature on collective action and social movements, it delves deep into the rebellion's inner workings. It examines how the residents of Alexandra - a poverty-stricken, segregated township in Johannesburg - manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time and power in their sequestered world; how they used political theatre to convey, stage and dramatise their struggle; and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics. Theatres of Struggle asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels, and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones.
First published in 1981, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class is a study of the role played by the ‘organic intellectuals’, who were attached to the capitalist class in South Africa, in shaping the processes of state and class formation in the crucial decades when the foundations of modern South Africa were being laid. The book examines how the political and ideological character of the imperialist, ‘British South African’, mining bourgeoisie was formed, which revolutionised southern Africa and remained dominant until the First World War, and how a national bourgeoisie emerged and later came to prevail which differed both as a political force and as the bearer of a new ‘South Africanist’ ideology. In both cases, the activities of the intellectuals are explained in terms of the economic imperatives of accumulation and the capitalists’ conflicts with other classes, and in each case, racism is viewed in the light of the overall system of hegemony created by capital. The origins of South African capitalism are examined finally from the point of view of one group of people—the capitalists themselves. A concrete and readable account of capitalists and their ideologies, this contribution to theories both of class and state formation and of the relationship between political, cultural, ideological and economic forces will be of importance to students and researchers of African studies and political science.
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