Cinema of social recuperation: Xenophobic violence and migrant subjectivity in contemporary South Africa

It is tempting to read recent xenophobic violence in South Africa as simply symptomatic of the extent to which non-citizens have been reduced to ‘bare life’, a condition characterised by the expulsion of a person from the order of socially valued existence and the subjection of that person to the va...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical psychology (Lawrence & Wishart) 2011-07, Vol.4 (2), p.103-120
Main Author: Strauss, Helene
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African literature
Apartheid
Cinema
Colleges & universities
Documentary films
Emotions
Everyday life
Identity
Legal status
Literary canon
Migrants
Motion pictures
Original Article
Social Sciences
South Africa
South African literature
Subjectivity
Violence
Xenophobia
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Summary:It is tempting to read recent xenophobic violence in South Africa as simply symptomatic of the extent to which non-citizens have been reduced to ‘bare life’, a condition characterised by the expulsion of a person from the order of socially valued existence and the subjection of that person to the vagaries of sovereign power. Although the category of homo sacer does shed some light on the condition of statelessness that leaves foreign migrants ‘stripped of their identity as legal beings’, it also risks misrecognising the lived, embodied complexity of migrant subjectivity. Through a reading of Adze Ugah's The Burning Man, a documentary film about the Mozambican man who was burned alive on 17 May 2008 as a result of xenophobic riots in South Africa, this article highlights some of the concrete, everyday social and affective networks that give migrant lives their unique subjective integrity.
ISSN:1755-6341
1755-635X
DOI:10.1057/sub.2011.7