Reworking Citizenship: Race, Gender, and Kinship in South Africa

"In scenes eerily reminiscent of the apartheid era, July 2021 saw South Africa's streets filled with angry crowds burning and looting shops. Some, enraged by the state of the nation, aimed to disrupt "business as usual." Others, many of them women of color, frustrated by their poverty and marginalization, crossed broken glass to collect food for hungry children. As one black woman told a reporter, reflecting on the country's transition from the apartheid era: "We didn't get freedom. We only got democracy." Across the world, anxieties abound that wage labor regimes and state-citizen covenants are eroding. What obligations do states have to support their citizens? What meaning does citizenship itself hold? This book details the broiling discontent around political belonging exposed by these and similar uprisings. Through long-term fieldwork with impoverished black African, Indian, and coloured (mixed race) South African women living in the Point, an urban neighborhood of Durban, South Africa's third largest city, Brady G'Sell highlights how they strive to rework political institutions that effectively exclude them. Blending intimate ethnography with rich historical analysis, her examples reveal the interrelationship between seemingly disconnected domains: citizenship, kinship, and political economy. G'Sell argues that women's kinship-based labor is central to ensuring the survival of modern states and imbues their citizenship with essential content, and through the notion of relational citizenship offers new imaginaries of political belonging"--
In scenes reminiscent of the apartheid era, 2021 saw South Africa's streets filled with mass protests. While the country is lauded for its peaceful transition to democracy with citizenship for all, those previously disenfranchised, particularly women, remain outraged by their continued poverty and marginalization. As one black woman protester told a reporter, reflecting on the end of apartheid: "We didn't get freedom. We only got democracy." What obligations do states have to support their citizens? What meaning does citizenship itself hold? Blending archival and ethnographic methods, Brady G'sell tracks how historic resistance to racial and gendered marginalization in South Africa animate present-day contentions that regardless of voting rights, without jobs to support their families, the poor majority remain excluded from the nation. Through long-term fieldwork with impoverished black African, Indian, and coloured (mixed race) women living in the city of Durban, she reveals women's everyday efforts to rework political institutions that exclude them. Informed by her interlocutors, G'sell retheorizes citizenship as not solely tied to individual rights, but dependent on the security of social (often kinship) relations. She forwards the concept of relational citizenship as a means to reimagine political belonging amidst a world of declining wage labor and eroding state-citizen covenants.