In post-colonial Zambia and post-apartheid South Africa, citizenship is assumed to be universal and to carry rights. Yet, in practice, in the everyday context in which ordinary women and men live out their lives, its meanings and values are differentiated in bodies and their politics, reflecting the social, spatial, gendered, and racial nature of inequality. Framed by global processes and national discourses, the crafting of citizenship and the substantiation of rights in urban Southern Africa remain fraught. In this issue of Feminist Africa, we elaborate on contesting body politics and the gendered crafting of urban citizenship in Lusaka and Cape Town. The notion of ‘crafting’ citizenship is central to our analysis. The lived negotiation of citizenship and the ways it is made meaningful in everyday peripheral parts of Southern African cities are neither static nor decreed through law.
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Editorial
Body Politics and the Gendered Crafting of Citizenship
– by Sophie Oldfield, Elaine Salo and Ann Schlyter
Features
Coconuts do not live in Townships: Cosmopolitanism and its Failures in the Urban Peripheries of Cape Town
– by Elaine Salo
Body politics and the Crafting of Citizenship in Peri-urban Lusaka
–by Ann Schlyter
De facto v/s de jure Home Ownership: Women’s Everyday Negotiations in Lusaka and Cape Town
–by Sian Butcher and Sophie Oldfield
“Marobot neMawaya” – Traffic Lights and Wire:
Crafting Zimbabwean Migrant Masculinities in Cape Town
– by Netsai Sarah Matshaka
Profiles
Nurturing Researchers, Building Local Knowledge:
The ‘Body Politics’ Project
– by Sophie Oldfield and Elaine Salo
Fieldwork Stories: Negotiating Positionality, Power and Purpose
– by Lynsey Bourke, Sian Butcher, Nixon Chisonga,
Jumani Clarke, Frances Davies & Jessica Thorn
Collaborative Research in Conversation
– by Koni Benson
A Regional Conversation on Southern African Cities and Towns: The Gender, Urbanisation and Everyday Life Research Project, 1992-2005
– by Matšeliso ‘Ma-Tlali Mapetla and Ann Schlyter
In Conversation
Living Language, Living Writing: A Profile of Sindiwe Magona
Elaine Salo speaks with Sindiwe Magona
Reviews
Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India.
Sangtin writers and Richa Nagar.Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006
– reviewed by Salma Ismail
Gender Activism: Perspectives on the South African Transition,Institutional Culture and Everyday Life. Greg Ruiters (ed.). Grahamstown: Rhodes University Institute of Social and Economic Research, 2008
– reviewed by Relebohile Moletsane