Presented By: Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
DAAS Africa Workshop: “Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City.”
with Zachary Levenson (Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University)
Abstract:
My recent book Delivery as Dispossession explains why nearly 30 years after the end of apartheid, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupations as threats to the government’s housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as “disorderly” threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do governments decide when to evict, and conversely, when to tolerate? These decisions are not made in a vacuum but instead require an analysis that expands what we typically call “the state.” This book argues that the state does not simply “see” occupations, as if they were a feature of the natural landscape. Rather, occupiers collectively project themselves to government actors, affecting how they are seen. But residents are not only seen; they also see, which shapes how they organize themselves. When residents see the state as an antagonist, they tend to unify under a single leadership; but when they see it as a potential ally, they often remain atomized as if they were individual customers. The unity in the former case projects an orderly population, less likely to be evicted; but the fragmentation in the latter case projects a disorderly mass, serving to legitimate eviction rulings.
Bio:
Zachary Levenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida International University and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press, 2022) and the co-editor of The South African African Tradition of Racial Capitalism (Routledge, 2024). He is currently working on his next book, which considers political diversity within the anti-apartheid movement.
My recent book Delivery as Dispossession explains why nearly 30 years after the end of apartheid, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupations as threats to the government’s housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as “disorderly” threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do governments decide when to evict, and conversely, when to tolerate? These decisions are not made in a vacuum but instead require an analysis that expands what we typically call “the state.” This book argues that the state does not simply “see” occupations, as if they were a feature of the natural landscape. Rather, occupiers collectively project themselves to government actors, affecting how they are seen. But residents are not only seen; they also see, which shapes how they organize themselves. When residents see the state as an antagonist, they tend to unify under a single leadership; but when they see it as a potential ally, they often remain atomized as if they were individual customers. The unity in the former case projects an orderly population, less likely to be evicted; but the fragmentation in the latter case projects a disorderly mass, serving to legitimate eviction rulings.
Bio:
Zachary Levenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida International University and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press, 2022) and the co-editor of The South African African Tradition of Racial Capitalism (Routledge, 2024). He is currently working on his next book, which considers political diversity within the anti-apartheid movement.
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