The Politics of the Near offers a novel approach to social unrest in post-apartheid South Africa. Keeping the noise of demonstrations, barricades, and clashes with the police at a distance, this ethnography of a poor people's movement traces individual commitments and the mainsprings of mobilization in the ordinary social and intimate life of activists, their relatives, and other township residents.Tournadre's approach picks up on aspects of activists lives that are often neglected in the study of social movements that help us better understand the dynamics of protest and the attachment of activists to their organization and its cause. What Tournadre calls a "politics of the near" takes shape, through sometimes innocuous actions and beyond the separation between public and domestic spheres.By mapping the daily life of Black and low-income neighborhoods and the intimate domain where expectations and disappointments surface, The Politics of the Near offers a different perspective on the "rainbow nation"—a perspective more sensitive to the fact that, three decades after the end of apartheid, poverty and race are still as tightly interwoven as ever.
Jérôme Tournadre is a research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is the author of A Turbulent South Africa: Post-Apartheid Social Protest.
Introduction 11 A South African City 272 The Sense of Community 46Interlude 1: Football, Community, and Politics 713 "We Are the People Who Stay with Them in the Township" 754 "My Blood Is Still Here, in UPM" 102Interlude 2: What Really Matters 1215 "It Is Moral to Rebel" 1296 "We Do Not Discuss Politics" 1487 Leaders in the Communities 174Interlude 3: Breakups 1948 Lost in Transition? 1999 The Community, the Movement, and the "Outside World" 22810 "Yes, We Do the Same Thing" 246Epilogue 263Acknowledgments 269Notes 271Works Cited 287Index 307
