EVENT DETAILS

PRECARIOUS LIBERATION: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa

PRECARIOUS LIBERATION:
Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa

A lecture by
FRANCO BARCHIESI
Associate Professor, Department of African American and African Studies, The Ohio State University

Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. This lecture, based on Franco Barchiesi's new book, Precarious Liberation, interrogates this important dilemma in the country’s democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government’s definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state’s normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa’s postapartheid experiment.

Free and open to the public.
Book signing to follow the lecture
2pm, Humanities Gateway 3000

This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and History; the Programs in Culture & Theory and Global Cultures; and the Critical Theory Emphasis.