Course Description

This is an annual week-long literature and discussion seminar organized by Dr. Henrik Ernstson and Dr. Andrés Henao Castro at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. The first seminar was held 27-31 July 2015 and the next is scheduled for 11-15 July, 2016. It invites PhD students and Early Career Scholars in particular from UCT, UWC, Stellenbosch and other South African universities. For 2016 we also hope to have some travel bursaries for non-Cape Town based participants. Some changes will be made to 2016 version of the seminar, but the outline below from 2015 gives a good indication. If you are interested, please send an email to Henrik Ernstson (henrik.ernstson[!at!]uct.ac.za). Course days: Monday to Friday, 9 – 12 am; Thursday longer with CityLab discussion and dinner in the evening. 

Some feedback from 2015 participants

“The group discussions were of perhaps the highest intellectual rigour and focus that I have ever experienced.”

“The readings from both sides – political theory and Southern urbanism – were well-chosen [and] Dr. Henao Castro and Dr. Ernstson created a nurturing space for collective reflection on specific local cases and popular debates that were generously shared by all participants.”

“The system of having intensive group meetings during the morning (allowing time in the afternoon for individual reading and reflection) suited my style of working.”

“Planning next year: Bit more people from different disciplines.”

“Participants should also be encouraged to relate the readings to their own work, with the opportunity for each to give a short presentation on how they relate the reading material to their own research projects.“

“I have tremendously enjoyed participating in the above seminar. It was well prepared, comprehensibly structured and intellectually stimulating. The guiding questions for each reading also came in very handy, especially when tackling the longer and more complex texts.”

Description 

This seminar emerges out of an interest to put into conversation two bodies of literature: political philosophy and global south urbanism. By gathering a seminar we want to understand and problematize the meaning and practices of democracy by attending to their often-neglected contentious spatial materializations. Our effort is that of relating questions about the doing and undoing of the demos to the interrogation of its material spaces of appearance and disappearance. By pairing democratic theory with the work of critical geographers and urbanists, our objective is not that of supplementing a theoretical abstraction with a concrete spatiality in the global south, but that of thinking about political subjectivity, collective agency and the distribution of power from the perspective of their embedded urban and non-urban settings. We want to ask, for example, how does the private (oikos) vs. public (polis) division of spaces in the classic Greek city helped to constitute the phone (voice) vs. logos (speech) division of rationality by which gendered and racialized bodies were depoliticized in the original making of the demos? How were those urban spaces transgressed, circumvented, rearranged, reimagined, etc., so as to trouble the very limits of the demos itself by these agents? How do these spatial contestations take place today, as our own theories of democracy change to signify conflict rather than consensus,orafuture-to-comeratherthananalreadypresentreality? Theseminarispartofa new ACC project on Radical Incrementalism and Theories/Practices of Emancipatory Change (RADINCSUPE) lead by Henrik Ernstson and Edgar Pieterse. The objective is also to use the seminar as a theoretical laboratory to elaborate a framing for a new ACC CityLab around “Democratic Practices in Unequal Geographies”.1 We hope this combination can contribute to the theoretical terrain of ACC and beyond.

Seminar Methodology 

Our seminar follows a rather usual historical trajectory as it moves from the origins of democracy in the ancient Greek polis to the current challenges democracy faces under neoliberal conditions of globalization. Yet it explores such historical transformation with a rather unusual emphasis on urban and non-urban landscapes in the global south. We want to discuss questions about speech, action, property, governmentality, the political, and the construction of the other, by placing these theories within uneven geographies that should trouble existing theoretical findings and help us to reformulate our research questions, methodologies approaches and theoretical assumptions.

In the readings we have chosen to place more emphasis on political philosophy as these are less known to most of us, and since this makes best use of Andrés’ visit here at ACC. The texts on global south urbanism will bring in contextual and theoretical aspects into seminar, but we also rely on participants’ wider reading and research on urbanization, global south and post colonialism. One of the participant’s reflected on how profoundly the seminar managed to create a collective space for thinking hard about fundamentals:

“Prior to the seminar I had not engaged with some of the foundational aspects of political thought. I tended to take certain political ideas for granted, without viewing these concepts, institutions or categories as having histories of their own. As a result, the seminar has enabled me to think more carefully and critically about contemporary political debates (e.g. around foreign migrants and neoliberalism). The seminar sharpened my awareness around what we can consider to be ‘political’, whether in objective reality or in the thought of key influential people. For example, I had never considered that Marx and Foucault (the heroes of many in the intellectual left) could be regarded as not having much to say about politics and the political. This has been a welcome challenge.”

Schedule and Readings 2015

We will meet for 3 hours every day. Dr. Andrés Henao Castro will start with talking for about 30-40 minutes to give context of the theoretical discussion, and make use of his long experience with these texts: what is at stake in the text, how the question changes the problematic, and summarize the main points, etc. Then we open the floor for discussion in which the global south urbanism literature will enter as ways to unpack and think about the seminar questions, how our empirical work are helped by these texts, while challenging them and ‘speaking back’. For all these will be a chance to re-think our own research and case studies.

Below follow questions to orient your reading, and serve as starting point for our discussions. Based on this you can write down and raise your own questions to further give direction to the seminar. We will have a short 10 minute break two hours into the seminar and then we will return for another 45 minutes of discussion. Coffee and tea will be served during the seminar. (NB: Global south urbanism reading and questions will be complemented later this week.)

Day 1 [Monday]: Origins of Democracy 

We will introduce the seminar and all participants will introduce themselves. Andrés will then talk about the origins of Democracy in Greece, and the definitions given by Plato and Aristotle. After that we will open for discussions. Outline:

1. Formulation of the problem: a. The paradox of democracy: undoing distinctions and the subject of equality. b. Philosophy versus democracy and the problem of colonialism. c. The relationship between democracy and the urban space.
2. Leading questions will be given to the reading
3. Key concepts: democracy, political regime, citizenship, and freedom.

Readings Day 1: Plato’s Book VIII and Aristotle’s Books I-III. The rest of these books are recommended.

Day 2 [Tuesday]: Modern Critique of Democracy (Democracy in Modernity) 

We will focus on Marx (On the Jewish Question) and Rousseau (Second Discourse on Inequality) and the question of property and link this with a reading on critical geographies in the global south during the period of the bourgeois liberal revolutions. Outline:

1. Formulation of the problem: a. The citizen versus the human: the ideological masking of inequality; b. Capitalism and Democracy; c. On private property and the improperty of the commons; d. The relationship between political power and space
2. Leading questions to guide the reading will be given.
3. Key concepts: democracy, capitalism, political, and social emancipation.

Readings Day 2: Compulsory reading is Marx’ “On the Jewish Question.” Rousseau’s text recommended. Compulsory reading is also Loftus, A., & Lumsden, F. (2008). Reworking hegemony in the urban waterscape. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(1), 109–126.

Day 3 [Wednesday]: The Paradox of Democracy (Democracy and Foreignness) 

This seminar will focus on the political function of the foreigner as what paradoxes foreigness help democracy to solve.

1. Formulation of the problem: a. The inversion of the question; b. The political functions of the foreigner, or the foreigner as deux ex machine; c. Storytelling and democratic founding; d. Territorial unrest and the mobility of the people
2. Leading questions to guide the reading will be given.
3. Key concepts: democracy, foreignness, paradox, foundings.

Readings Day 3: Compulsory Chapters 1, 3 and 4 from Bonnie Honig’s book Democracy and the Foreigner. The other chapters are recommended. Compulsory reading is also Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. L. (2001). Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State. Social Identities, 7(2), 233–265. Recommended reading is: Mbembe, A. (2002). African Modes of Self-Writing. Public Culture, 14(1), 239–273; Mbembe, A., & Nuttall, S. (2004). Writing the World from an African Metropolis. Public Culture, 16(3), 347–372.

Day 4 [Thursday]: The Hatred of Democracy

This seminar focus on Jacques Ranciére’s work on democracy, proper political sequence, and the distritbution of the sensible and how that translates into contexts of cities and societies of the South.

1. Formulation of the problem: a. Democracy versus consensus; b. Democracy as a form of political subjectivation; c. Democracy and theatricality: on the aesthetics of the political; d. The (non)space of democracy: on the redistribution of the sensible;
2. Leading questions to guide the reading will be given.
3. Key concepts: democracy, police, supplement, scandal of equality.

Dinner in the evening!

Readings Day 4: Compulsory reading is Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy; Recommended reading is Rancierés Democracy and Consensus. Compulsory reading is also Pithouse, R. (2008). A Politics of the Poor: Shack Dwellers’ Struggles in Durban. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 43(1), 63–94. Recommended reading is Ernstson, H. (n.d.). Situating ecologies and re-distributing expertise: the material semiotics of people and plants at Bottom Road, Cape Town. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Day 5 [Friday]: Democracy and Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism

1. Formulation of the problem: a. The demos as “homo politicus”; b. Politics versus economics; c. Neoliberalism as governmental rationality; d. The imagination of political spaces.
2. Leading questions to guide the reading will be given.
3. Key concepts: democracy, neoliberalism, rationality, homo economicus/politicus.

Readings Day 5: Compulsory reading is Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 6 of Wendy Brown’s book Undoing the Demos. Compulsory reading is also Simone, AboduMaliq (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407–429. Recommended reading is Gandy, M. (2005). Learning from Lagos. New Left Review, 33, 37–52.

Reading list for the seminar 2015

Note that * indicates compulsory reading.

Political Philsophy 

PLATO. 2004. “Book II, Book VII and Book VIII*,” in: Republic, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

ARISTOTLE. 1996. “Books I*, II*, III*,” in: Politics, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press

BROWN, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution*, New York: Zone Books (all of it is compulsory; but it is difficult to access; see note below).

HONIG, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press (Compulsory: Chapters 1*, 3* and 4*; Chapter 2 recommended).

MARX. Karl. 1978. “The Jewish Question”*, in: The Marx-Engels Reader, Norton, pp. 26-52. RANCIÈRE, Jacques. 2006. Hatred of Democracy*, Verso, New York (all of it).
ROUSSEAU. Jean-Jacques. 1985. “Second Part,” in: Second Discourse on Inequality, New York:

Penguin Classics. (Recommended)

Global South Urbanism 

Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. L. (2001). Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State. Social Identities, 7(2), 233–265.

Gandy, M. (2005). Learning from Lagos. New Left Review, 33(May June), 37–52.
Loftus, A., & Lumsden, F. (2008). Reworking hegemony in the urban waterscape. Transactions 

of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(1), 109–126.
Simone, A. (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public 

Culture, 16(3)

Recommended reading is: 

Ernstson, H. (n.d.). Situating ecologies and re-distributing expertise: the material semiotics of people and plants at Bottom Road, Cape Town. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Mbembe, A. (2002). African Modes of Self-Writing. Public Culture, 14(1), 239–273. Mbembe, A., & Nuttall, S. (2004). Writing the World from an African Metropolis. Public Culture, 16(3), 347–372.