Search

There are renewed global efforts to make wildlife conservation the foundation for broad-based economic development. This article looks at these tendencies in the 'Kruger to Canyons' (K2C) biosphere region in South Africa, encompassing the Kruger National Park and adjacent settlement areas and reserves. Various forms of the wildlife economy have a long history in this region. However, it is increasingly posited as a preternatural means for creating jobs. We chronicle the growth of the wildlife economy from its apartheid heyday to the present, showing its fundamental dependence on the ecological and political fragmentation of space. More generally, these biopolitical divisions are part of a broad contestation of wildlife value, organised around changing regimes of protected area enclosure and the spacing of human and non-human life. Despite recent claims by the South African conservation industry that it is demolishing fences and increasing habitat connectivity, political territorialisation and ecological fragmentation continue to be important means of securing profit and reducing perceived risk. While the contradictions of this dynamic have now become acute through the emergence of the rhino-poaching crisis, the growth of that violent industry, we conclude, should not be seen as the negative inversion of a legal wildlife economy. Instead, both the legal and the illegal wildlife economies are manifestations of the same underlying problems: ill-conceived attempts at agrarian reform; the persistent influence of an older veterinary wildlife assemblage; the continued role of the rural poor as an enabling but unacknowledged buffer between development and wildlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extreme inequality in South African education is well-documented by researchers. There is also a rich literature concerned with education for sustainable development (ESD) in the country. The relationship between these two phenomena has, however, been sparsely investigated. Drawing on biopolitical theory and fieldwork conducted in South Africa, this paper queries how ESD programmes handle the lifestyle gap that separates rich and poor populations. The article demonstrates how ESD, through ostensible sensitivity to local 'realities', is adjusted to comply with different socio-economic living conditions, and how different roles are assigned to rich and poor in the quest for sustainable development. This differentiation, it is argued, can be understood biopolitically. The paper further argues that the differentiation between populations in rich and poor settings implies a depoliticized notion of local 'realities' as something isolated and given, rather than relational and produced. While the overall findings suggest that ESD unfolds through a regime of practice wherein inequality has become effectively normalized, the paper also points to rare disruptive moments where the normal is rendered abnormal. Ultimately it is argued that the South African case is a useful entry-point for discussing generic problems of globally implementing ESD in an enormously unequal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are important opportunities to further consider how the framework presented by homonationalism can apply beyond relationships connected to the US or the Middle East where it is traditionally applied. From a southern perspective and focusing on post-apartheid South Africa, this article examines how homonationalism's framings may help us understand the subjectification of diverse sexualities in the country through their connection to national and regional politics. It begins by exploring the historical connections between biopolitics and necropolitics in South Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic, to highlight how different contemporary sexual subjectivities are imbricated with different types of biopolitical population regulation. It then argues that such differences are reflected through and furthered by the way South Africa has projected ideas of its sexual exceptionalism within the wider region, a process that itself relies on South African-specific homonormativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gugulective is an art collective that has been at the forefront in the contestation of neoliberal capitalism in post-Apartheid South Africa focusing on the economies of place, space and race, and using the shebeen as the centre for its activist aesthetics. Installations and photomontages are the group's well-known signature media. However, an emphasis on these material aesthetic objects occludes the immaterial dimension of the group's collaborative projects. A focus on Guguctive's immaterial practices such as performances and discussions, which I call biopolitical collectivism due to their subject-centred and life-forming collectivist aesthetic praxis, reveals how the group contests the dehumanisation of black bodies in contemporary capitalism. This is particularly evident in projects such as Indaba Ludabi, Akuchanywa Apha, and Titled/Untitled in which the Gugulective confronts issues of place, space and race by deploying a cross-disciplinary and interstitial aesthetic practice which situates itself between the art institution and the non-artworld, between aesthetics and activism, the township and the city, the shebeen and the gallery, affects and the art object, art and life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]