Loren B. Landau

Tactical Cosmopolitanism and Idioms of Belonging: Insertion and Self-Exclusion in Johannesburg

Research amongst immigrant groups in Johannesburg points to the emergence of distinctive ways of negotiating inclusion and belonging that transcend ethnic, national or transnational paradigms. Confronted with new South African nationalism, a restrictive immigration regime and xenophobia, immigrants have reacted with what we term ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ to negotiate partial inclusion in South Africas transforming society without becoming bounded by it. Rather than a coherent philosophy, it is a mish-mash of rhetorical and organisational tools drawing on a diversity of more established discourses and value systems. In so doing, they capitalise on cosmopolitanisms power without being bound by its responsibilities. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on cosmopolitanism ‘from below’, conceptualised not as a philosophy but as a practice and form of experiential culture.

Transplants and Transients: Idioms of Belonging and Dislocation in Inner-City Johannesburg

Abstract: South Africas economic and political liberalization have engendered new patterns of immigration and urbanization that find South Africans and foreign migrants converging on the streets of inner-city Johannesburg. As they interact, citizens and non-nationals have developed competing idioms for relating to one another and the space they share. For South Africans, this often means appealing to a nativist idiom that locates commonality amidst an allochthonous citizenry while attempting to prohibit foreign transplantation. Non-nationals counter this with an idiom of permanent transit, a way of positioning themselves as outsiders lodged in a superior and unrooted state. These idioms represent competing visions for the inner citys future. For South Africans, the idiom is a generative node of modern nationalist formation. For those permanently passing through the city, it is an idiom of a denationalized “nowhereville.”

Discrimination and development? Immigration, urbanisation and sustainable livelihoods in Johannesburg

Through its analysis of new survey data and interviews coupled with participant observation, this article examines how official and popular responses to international migration and urbanisation may undermine Johannesburgs efforts to build a prosperous, safe and inclusive city. Working from the position that international migration is an inexorable response to regional economic inequality, it illustrates how ignorance, xenophobia and legal discrimination are preventing significant numbers of foreign migrants from productively integrating into Johannesburgs politics, economy and communities. It concludes that, in an era of migration, building inclusive and sustainable cities means finding creative ways to combat discrimination based on nationality, even when such exclusion is legally, politically, and socially mandated. Doing otherwise tacitly endorses human rights abuses, social fragmentation, inequitable growth and insecurity.Through its analysis of new survey data and interviews coupled with participant observation, this article examines how official and popular responses to international migration and urbanisation may undermine Johannesburgs efforts to build a prosperous, safe and inclusive city. Working from the position that international migration is an inexorable response to regional economic inequality, it illustrates how ignorance, xenophobia and legal discrimination are preventing significant numbers of foreign migrants from productively integrating into Johannesburgs politics, economy and communities. It concludes that, in an era of migration, building inclusive and sustainable cities means finding creative ways to combat discrimination based on nationality, even when such exclusion is legally, politically, and socially mandated. Doing otherwise tacitly endorses human rights abuses, social fragmentation, inequitable growth and insecurity. 1Director, Forced Migration Studies Programme, Graduate School for the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand. Earlier versions of this article were presented to ‘Towards a local government response to migration and urbanisation’, a workshop convened by the South African Cities Network, Johannesburg (16 September 2005) and the Xenophobia Conference convened by the Gauteng Provincial Department of Community Safety, Johannesburg (18–19 August 2005).

Living Within and Beyond Johannesburg: Exclusion, Religion, and Emerging Forms of Being

Drawing on original survey data and interviews, this article explores forms of exclusion, solidarity, and mutual recognition taking shape in Johannesburg among the citys new arrivals and long-term residents. It begins by highlighting three aspects of migrant life in central Johannesburg that situate affiliations with religion, kin, and space. The first is the relative absence of a self-defined and dominant host community; the second is the presence of a virulent and often violent nativism; and lastly, the strategies of recent arrivals to be both part of and apart from the city. In exploring these elements, the article suggests that religion is one of a number of strategies for negotiating inclusion and belonging while transcending ethnic, national and transnational paradigms. Central to these ambitions is ensuring partial inclusion in a transforming society without becoming bounded by it. Rather than reiterating a coherent or consistent philosophy, these are syncretic and ever-evolving amalgams of rhetorical and organisational tools drawing on a diversity of more established discourses and value systems. Through these articulations, migrants are inventing a new language of belonging that may generate unexpected, unpredictable, yet lasting categories of collective membership.

Conviviality, Rights, and Conflict in Africa’s Urban Estuaries

Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa’s cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state institutions or dominant cultural norms, these areas have become estuarial zones in which varied communities of convenience are taking shape. Unlike well-documented urban gateways or ghettos, these communities range from radical forms of exclusion to remarkable modes of accommodation that enable people to extract usufruct rights: to live in but not become fully part of the cities they occupy. Using examples from Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, this article explores the nature of these estuaries in ways that challenge the conceptual foundations typically informing debates over migrant rights, integration, and the boundaries of belonging. This means eroding clear distinctions between hosts and guests along with a call to reevaluate the relative importance of state institutions and policies. Most fundamentally, it questions new residents’ interests in localized political and social recognition and participation. The article concludes by suggesting the need to reconsider the forms and scale of community through which the newly urbanized claim rights and the nature of the rights they desire.

Beggaring belonging in Africa's no-man's lands: diversity, usufruct and the ethics of accommodation

ABSTRACT In the migrant rich peri-urban sites of Rongai, Kenya and Katlehong, South Africa, social engagements are being shaped by usufruct ethics. The resulting modes of mutual accommodation are shaped by spatial circumstance and instrumental, pragmatic concerns rather than claims for ownership, representation, or cultural hegemony. In Kenya, ‘being cosmo’ enables residents to brace themselves against ethnicised violence and exclusion while opening space for multi-ethnic newcomers to pursue varied economic and social ambitions often tied to exclusive, ethnicised membership elsewhere. In South Africa, outcomes include multiple ethics of difference simultaneously practiced: some violently exclusive, others remarkably inclusive, yet without enduring hegemonies. Here, residents manage their every-day interactions with Others through disconnection—by ‘minding their own business’—a principle manifested in both passive tolerance and active benefit-seeking. These findings from Africa’s rapidly transforming urban peripheries speak to a growing, global trend in which varied forms of membership are being locally negotiated in the thrown together spaces that characterise many cities of the South. Beyond understanding such local dynamics, they give cause to question the spatial scale at which we locate integration and the very ethics and desired ‘outcomes’ scholars often presume ought to underlie diverse societies.

Friendship fears and communities of convenience in Africa’s urban estuaries: Connection as measure of urban condition:

Across the developing world, immigrants, internal migrants and long-time residents increasingly co-occupy and co-produce estuarial zones: sites loosely structured by the disciplines of state, formal employment or hegemonic cultural norms. In these hyper-diverse, often highly fluid sites, the appearance and form of friendships and solidarities are varied and revealing. Drawing on examples from rapidly transforming African cities – particularly Johannesburg and Nairobi – this article adds three facets to the emerging literature on urban friendship. First, it outlines conditions under which the localised intimacy of friendship represents a potentially frightening form of social obligation and regulation. Given many ‘southern’ urban economies’ uncertainty and migrants’ orientation to ‘multiple elsewheres’, local solidarities – including friendship – are often more frustration than facilitator. Second, it suggests that amidst these seemingly anomic, distrustful sites, residents forge shared values and socialities that eschew friendships’ potentially confining bonds. These ‘communities of convenience’ illustrate the value of solidarity in migrant-rich spaces while raising broader questions about the spatial scale and role of affective relationships in overcoming economic and physical precarity. It lastly argues that the relative strength of localised friendships provide a means of comparing urban sites while revealing rationalities – political, economic and social – at work: friendship fears reveal the distinct estuarial spaces shaped by ongoing movements of people into, out of, and through precarious cities of the south.

Introduction: Forging a Study of Mobility, Integration and Belonging in Africa

This is an era in which varied forms of human mobility are redefining the meanings of home, community and belonging across the world, giving rise to novel forms of membership. This chapter argues that the experiences of Africans moving within the continent provide valuable insights into these memberships and the practical and ethical foundations on which they rest. It outlines the volume’s various case studies and highlights their contributions to scholarly debates. In so doing, it evokes the forge as a dual metaphor: on the one hand transforming, as mobility forms and reshapes the meaning and boundaries of community; on the other hand dissembling, as people consciously disguise their history or aspirations, generating inventive forms of representation that allow for novel ways of being. This approach draws attention to migrants, hosts, politicians and others as active, strategic and tactical actors at play within structural constraints and opportunities, rather than as passive subjects of these structural forces. The outcome may not fit with our normative aspirations; some will be illegal, morally dubious and physically precarious. Some others may embrace norms of rights and tolerance, while others reject the moral and political foundations of space-based political community. The chapter concludes by arguing that the work of scholars is not to celebrate the universal power of the subaltern or blindly condemn the constraints imposed by capitalism or coercive states, but rather to document and theorise these outcomes and their determinants. These tasks are at the centre of this chapter and the book it introduces.

Conclusion: Archipelagos and Estuaries: Mobility, Local Authorities and the Governance of Multiple Elsewheres

Rapid movements of people into, within and out of cities worldwide are rescaling and respatialising process of economic and social exchange and forms of political representation and membership. Drawing on empirical research in South Africa and Botswana, this chapter considers the politics and governance of estuarial zones and archipelagos generated by rapid population growth, ongoing human mobility and socio-economic translocality. It argues that local authorities are rarely equipped to respond to the fundamental challenges these formations present let alone capitalise on the opportunities such fluid urbanism offers. The obstacles are conceptual, institutional and political. For one, there is insufficient awareness and acceptance that movement and multilocality have local implications, and are local responsibilities. Yet for municipal authorities to develop proactive, progressive responses, institutional and political incentives––including budgeting and accountability––must also be recognised and addressed. This will require reconsidering administrative demarcation and understandings of political community. The chapter ends with suggestions for developing new modes of analysis and engagement reconsidered for an era of mobility and multilocality.

No borders: The politics of immigration control and resistance

has lost more than 50% of the territory it controlled. Moreover there is a good chance that, by the end of 2017, IS’s de facto capital, Raqqa, will fall. Ultimately, Rogers’s own recommendations for peace are hardly convincing – an end to the ‘neo-liberal model of free-market capitalism’ and ‘a radical move towards ultra-low carbon economies’ (p. 196). These are unconvincing precisely because the free-market system and global warming hardly feature in IS’s own statements. It would seem that Rogers is projecting his own academic bias onto the militant jihadists of IS and, in the process, misunderstanding the nature of the beast he is confronting.