Citizenship and Solidarity in the Age of Identity Politics in South Africa

The 2016 #EndRapeCulture campaign on university campuses in South Africa created a new feminist energy/anger when young, mainly African, women students embraced the identities of radical, intersectional, African feminists. They emphasised their intersectional identities (and the precariousness of being young and black in South Africa) in protest marches that reclaimed women’s bodies as part of a bigger movement that was also aimed at decolonizing universities in South Africa. The students argued that Western (read white) institutional cultures reflected a lack of African values and were symbolic of a lack of decolonization that they found profoundly alienating. This campaign that engulfed the country in 2016 can be considered as lived citizenship that relate to Isin’s notion of “acts of citizenship” that refused the alienation from the liberal notion of rights claiming in a country where women are rendered into bare life (Agamben) through extraordinary high levels of violence. Using a context of anti-colonial struggles for my theorizing I will engage marginality as productive of subjectivity. I will draw on Joe Turner’s notion of the collective experience of refusal and disturbance (and the politics of rage) to engage the question whether these disturbances make solidarities possible, looking closer at affective solidarity as theorized by Jodi Dean.