Hanneke Stuit

Afterword: Ubuntu Security

Stuit synthesizes the findings of the individual chapters of the book in a description of a sign posted on a fence by the Ubuntu Security company in Pretoria. From this discussion, ubuntu emerges as a balancing act between openness towards others and personal security that may require strategic negotiations of differing, but converging interests rather than an uncritical reliance on the ethical importance of ubuntu as a given and shared humanity. By making the unavoidable influence of power relations in everyday uses of ubuntu visible, the book seeks to emphasize the importance of analysing how ubuntu is formulated and culturally expressed in fulfilling its full ethical potential.

Ubuntu in Transit: From Divisive Pasts to Open Futures

Stuit opens up an interpretation of ubuntu that counters its frequent use to refer to a “lost” common humanity in an idealized past that needs to be recovered as a predetermined future. Instead, Stuit proposes to think of ubuntu as a convergence of differing and historically contingent interests and pairs ubuntu with the assemblage (DeLanda), answerability (Bakhtin), and the future anterior (Spivak). The chapter further explores the ethical demands placed on the subject by the fact that human relations change constantly. The focus on contingency in the case studies of Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me and Coetzee’s Age of Iron locates a basis for responsible action in these conditions of uncertainty, which differs from the communal forms offered by familial, sexual, and historical relations.

Facing Others: Towards an Ethics of Ubuntu

Stuit further explores ubuntu as a convergence of interests by comparing the idea of responsibility in Levinas to the concept of ubuntu. This discussion focuses on multiplicity and complicity and is realized through analysing Muholi’s photographic series Faces and Phases, which aims to obtain public space for fluid notions of gender, sexuality, and race. Ubuntu emerges as an activation of the individual’s relation to his or her surroundings rather than as a paralysing contradiction (or aporia) that inhibits the individual’s agency. This possible location for an ethics of ubuntu is further explored through a close reading of Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, where community consists of a strategic negotiation of openness towards others without losing the personal security needed to relate to others on an equal footing.

“The Ubuntu Strategy”: Commodification and the Affective Politics of Ubuntu

Stuit discusses the intersections between commodification, affect, and politics in recent uses of ubuntu. She discusses the role of language and affect in the recent outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa and addresses the strategic use of ubuntu’s positive affective charge in market-oriented approaches of ubuntu locally and globally. Objects discussed are a FIFA commercial, Ubuntu Cola, Ubuntu Linux, and recent management and HRM discourses. With reference to Žižek’s commodity fetishism, Stuit shows that these marketed expressions of ubuntu strategically circulate the positive affect associated with ubuntu and problematically rely on notions of social exclusion and private property. The final case study of the book focuses on the political application of ubuntu by the Durban Shack Dwellers Movement in comparison with Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude.

Ubuntu and Common Humanity in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Stuit analyses the use of ubuntu as a political discourse by the South African TRC, where it became interrelated with forgiveness as the preferred mode of interaction between victims and perpetrators in the process of reconciliation and nation-building. Stuit discusses how the meaning of ubuntu in this context revolves around a contradictory use of a notion of common humanity that is claimed to be all-inclusive but also (re)installs a new benchmark for communal and national belonging. Yet, as becomes clear from a close reading of some of Krog’s TRC-related poetry, this discursive strategy of implementing ubuntu and forgiveness also offers a place from which it becomes possible to change, or at the very least, act upon this dominant discourse from within.

Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present

Peripheral Visions sheds new light on how today’s peripheries are made, lived, imagined and mobilized. Focusing on space, mobility and aesthetics, it argues that peripheries require more visibility, and are invaluable for creating alternative perspectives on the globalizing present.

Introduction: Ubuntu1 Unchained—A Travelling Concept

In the introduction to Ubuntu Strategies, Stuit traces how ubuntu has been theorized in different disciplines, focusing on how these ubuntu discourses often perpetuate uncritical assumptions about a universal notion of common humanity that forms the basis of the ubuntu concept. By critically investigating the equation of ubuntu with the concept of hospitality, Stuit brings to the fore that ubuntu is in fact an ambiguous concept that can lead to the social exclusion as well as inclusion of what is assumed to be human. Stuit argues for an analysis of ubuntu through the lens of the strategic, which acknowledges the pervasiveness of power relations in everyday practices and takes into account that ubuntu is not a given, but can involve conscious, strategic decisions.