Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference

This special issue on ‘Xenophobia, nationalism and techniques of difference’ begins with a provocation: a series of flags which can be construed as the legitimate narrative around organisation, celebration and campaigning, an urgent call for action or solidarity. Two versions of the same flag are presented that are essentially formal inversions. Each calls up a specific stylised emblem, beginning with the organisational flag – a palisade fence; followed by the rally flag - an eight-point star. The ceremonial flag reads GROIN in bold capital letters, presumably the abbreviated name of the movement, but also a puzzling word, with its bodily or sexual connotations. The parade flags could be read as an architectural detail, and similar to the fence in the first flag points to a barrier or wall. There is only one campaign flag, depicting the shape of a knife or machete poised upward at an angle, with the bottom end of the handle forming a drop. As the last flag in the series it is the most aggressive one, an obvious call to violence, declaring the means and stakes of GROIN. In colour the flags appear more fascist than in their black and white versions, aligning themselves with the forceful graphics and rhetorics associated with extremism.¹

GROIN stands for Get Rid Of Immigrants Now. The emblem on the second flag, the star, is a stylised combination of a compass and the shape of a bullet’s exit wound. The parade flag is based on the closing mechanism of a castle gate, or fort, depicted as on our cover with the teeth sinking into the ground to steady against unauthorised access or assault. Structure, technology, order and clarity are foregrounded in the flags. The provocation lies less in the content and purpose of the flag series and the logic of hyperbole which may cause indignation. Rather, it lies in its possibility, in asking us to hold their logic, appeal and reality in mind. The flags are intended as a visual essay, conceptualised by artist and academic Raimi Gbadamosi for this special issue, and used to open the issue. The text accompanying the flags consists of a collection of ‘testimonies’ and appears at the very end of this issue. Flags and testimonies confuse what is believable, real or fictional. The language employed is militant and declarative. It throws into stark contrast some of the core questions that have framed the call for this issue:

• How are technologies of difference aestheticised?

• How does space and the ways persons and relations are made in space shape the making of difference?

• How do the incidences of ‘xenophobic violence’ of 2008 and 2015 mobilise solidarities and attachments to ideals of the nation and/or the self?

The nation as an organising principle remains largely an optimistic object. Optimistic both in the sense that it systematically organises the breadth of our aspirations and the boundaries around which we mobilise the possibilities for modes of making social justice; and also in the sense that the promise that the nation offers to bind us all together in something we share retains its coherence. This optimism forms a running tension across the work featured in the issue. Despite what we might assume to know about the nation as a technology, the assumption that it might offer something that would not necessarily produce those who are constitutive ‘others’ is the very assumption that carries the kinds of negative feeling that we encounter when we witness or perceive violent forms of aggression such as xenophobia.

Homi K. Bhabha (1994) names this ambivalence, writing against the certainty of the nation. Bhabha reminds us that the borders of the nation have a doubleness that on the one hand claims the historical progression/progressiveness of the nation and on the other hand recognises this claim as a narrative strategy that is an operation of symbolic power. This is a temporal doubleness; you can claim the nation and its time as progress and inclusion, while simultaneously claiming the nation as a relation of cultural identifications that assume a ‘we’ that belongs to it and a limit to who do not. Lauren Berlant (1991) refers to this as the “national symbolic” that forms historical and political collectives and subjectivities that ultimately produce a national fantasy about what, who or how the nation is. By fantasy, Berlant refers to the importance of the personal or intimate in circulating collective consciousness.

What Berlant also highlights is the connection between an intimate public sphere and the figure of the citizen. Citizenship can then be understood as a condition of social membership or belonging that is not simply made by one’s legal status, but is mediated by personal relations, acts and values. That is, that a way of organising intimate life or the family as circulated through national fantasies has the effect of producing ‘the nation’ precisely at the expense of those outside what are considered to be acceptable public configurations for social life. It is our interest here to open up a discussion about xenophobia, the nation and techniques of difference from this set of premises.

Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) offers another set of useful questions for us. Ahmed’s argument is animated by an examination of ordinary, everyday lived emotions as being central to the materiality of the nation state. Cultural politics of emotion refer to the ways that certain signs or techniques mark bodies in ways that materialise in how worlds are made, or lived. The nation state necessarily produces constitutive ‘Others’, as emotions organise bodies aligning some within and others outside of what constitutes a community. Eddie Ombagi offers a thorough account of Ahmed’s broader project in this issue, demonstrating the distinctions made in Ahmed’s work from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) thesis about the nation as an imagined community. As Guest Editors we have been densely guided by Ahmed’s thinking of the nation and emotion together.

Our thinking regarding xenophobia is guided by an interrogation of the attachment to the nation and to its promise as a rhetorical terrain. For instance, in April 2015 several thousands of people marched against xenophobia across the country. The massive response to the xenophobic attacks that preceded these reconciliatory gestures instigate some questions about the affective events that organise the nation. The response to specific kinds of violence were quite distinct from how we usually respond (or don’t at all) to more ordinary forms of exclusion. That is, the events of spectacular violence in 2008 and 2015 were somehow more able to instigate powerful performances of the nation mobilised around the feeling of shame.

Dean Hutton’s contribution, ‘The Performance of Violence. #Afrophobia’, consists of a series of photographs taken on the evening of 17 April 2015 at the Wolhuter Men’s Hostel (known as Jeppe Hostel) in Jeppestown, Johannesburg.² The photographs are laid out as vertical strips, to be read from top to bottom; each sequence chronicles a specific moment in the unfolding ‘events’ of the evening. We are not presented with a single iconic image that captures ‘the story’ supported by factual descriptions, apart from the place and date.³ The situation appears to be complex, visually messy, and draws attention to both the performativity of the images and the performance in the image, in which hostel dwellers, reporters, photographers, streets, buildings, objects, daylight, etc., enact familiar roles. Hutton points to the presence of the journalists and photographers, usually omitted in media reports, and their participation: not merely as neutral witnesses to a situation, but at times ‘providing impetus’ for acts of violence. Hutton also points to our viewing process, asking us to interrogate the images in relation to each other, as multiple frames that construct a chronology and accelerated moments. As viewers we are drafted into the emotive production of the content (see Steyerl, 2009). Each page is numbered as ‘contact sheet’, mimicking the analogue process of printing photographs from film negatives. The black and white documentary register of the photographic strip is a deliberate manipulation, a formal decision that draws on visual expectations, aesthetics and the promise of the photograph’s indexical relation to reality. That we are looking at a reconstruction is obvious. In the process the desire to look, visual normality and collective memory are questioned, and with it the position of the audience/viewer in the performance, consumption and representation of violence as it is shaped and circulated by media.

The images we have selected from Hutton instigate a range of emotions demonstrative of how we are thinking about the cultural politics of emotion and how they are connected to techniques of difference. Here we see how bodies, here the bodies of young black men, are inscribed with dense feeling and meaning concerned with the nation’s time, shame and optimism. These young men, who are recorded performing a demand to the nation through the excision of ‘Others’, demonstrate the failure of national time as progress, or something Lauren Berlant describes as cruel optimism to name “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility” (2011:24). Often the kinds of questions we ask in order to explain the what, why or how of xenophobia are opened by mumbled emotive contradictions precisely because of our attachment to the nation. Ahmed (2004:102) writes:

The detachments of shame from individual bodies does a certain kind of work within the narrative. Individuals become implicated in national shame insofar as they already belong to the nation, insofar as their allegiance has already been given to the nation, and they become subject to its address. Our shame is ‘my shame’ insofar as I am already ‘with them’, insofar as the ‘our’ can be uttered by me. [ … ]

What is striking is how shame becomes not only a mode of recognition of injustices committed against others, but also as a form of nation building. It is shame that allows us to ‘assert our identity as a nation’. Recognition works to restore the nation or reconcile the nation to itself by ‘coming to terms with’ its own past in the expression of ‘bad feeling’.

Ahmed speaks in reference to a statement made on behalf of the Australian nation in apology for injustices committed against indigenous peoples. Taking her example, we can draw an analogy with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (see Driver (2005) and Gqola (2001) for example). Our interest as Guest Editors was to think about form, technique, narrative style or structure and emotions attached to the nation, and we also observe the optimistic attachment to the nation as a productive preoccupation that connects the range of interventions produced by our various contributors.

Xenophobic violence in South Africa

In May 2008 nearly 70 people were killed, many more were injured and over 100 000 were displaced in violent attacks on people perceived to be foreigners (see Hassim, Kupe and Worby, 2008; Landau, 2012). This kind of outbreak was repeated in April 2015, and both events were spectacularly captured in media images. Michael Neocosmos (2010) identifies four ways that people have tried to explain these xenophobic events that he finds inadequate:

• that people feel relative deprivation, or a gap between what they feel entitled to and what they actually receive from the democratic nation;

• that foreigners represent what is ‘unknown’;

• that apartheid produced a brutal and hostile culture that makes South Africans unable to tolerate any difference; and

• that racism can explain it as it produces ‘Others’ that are considered to be dangerous.

What Neocosmos finds inadequate about many of these explanatory gestures is that they often locate the source of xenophobia in the bodies or actions of poor individuals, rather than noticing the xenophobic practices of State institutions, for example. Noting that for him, when we think about the relationship between nationalism and xenophobia we should not necessarily assume that the exclusion of foreigners is obvious or natural, as the evidence in South Africa’s case at least demonstrates that it is often specifically those who are from Africa who are perceived as ‘strangers’. “Xenophobia then is not so much a problem of post-modernity as such, but rather one of post-coloniality in particular” (2010:9) he writes, describing it as “an effect of a particular form of nationalism” (2010:10). Neocosmos (2010:10) makes this distinction through Frantz Fanon, as:

for Fanon then, there had been a shift from citizenship as a unifying notion during the struggle for independence which also possessed a strong emancipatory and pan-African component, to citizenship in the post-colony which is not founded on a notion of indigeneity and is essentially exclusive.

In our volume Malose Langa and Peace Kiguwa use the work of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko as a means of understanding negative social representations of black foreign nationals, which they argue are central to the legitimations of xenophobia and other attacks made on this group. Langa and Kiguwa argue for a psychosocial mode of analysis that attends to the politics of race, language, gender and class. Camalita Naicker also urges an extension of our language concerning xenophobia. For Naicker, xenophobic discourses and language are produced by and constitutive of precarious living and labour conditions and restricted access to citizenship rights from the State, experienced by all people who are categorised as ‘migrants’ internally, and ‘foreigners’ or ‘refugees’ by government officials. Naicker’s takes Neocosmos’ (2010) insights as a point of departure, and like Langa and Kiguwa is invested in the possibility of solidarity.

For Naicker, Pan-Africanism and collective ideas about freedom, or ‘bonds of solidarity’ that migrant labourers share, whether or not they are actually South African citizens, should mobilise a more refracted notion of citizenship informed by historical and ongoing struggles against colonialism, apartheid and their ongoing effects. On the other hand, Langa and Kiguwa’s provocation questions the possibility of such solidarity, as they argue that it is rather that despite opportunities for collective ideas, xenophobia instead reveals the affects and effects of antiblackness that produce xenophobia as negrophobia. That is, that xenophobia is not simply the fear, hatred of or discrimination based on non-autochthony, but appears specifically as antiblack violence.

The use of language to name who does and who does not belong to the nation is a preoccupation of several authors in this issue. Margaret Chandia and Tim Hart take Margaret’s experiences of being a South African child born of immigrant parents to demonstrate the ordinariness of xenophobia. That is, that while our attention gets caught by the gruesome images we witnessed in 2008 and 2015, these images often draw our attention away from the more widely lived experiences of xenophobia that impact the extent to which ordinary people experience their relationship to citizenship, or belonging.

Another route to this set of questions is taken in the article by Catherine Ndinda and Tidings Ndlovu, who examine the attitudes of informal settlement residents towards foreigners whose status of non-belonging is often articulated through the figure of the ‘makwerekwere’. Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s (2006) book Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia describes how citizenship is bound by relations, practices and statuses that are not simply formed in binaries between those who are inside and those who are outside. Nyamnjoh offers a powerful example of the Kalanga in Botswana, who he describes as being both citizens and makwerekwere to expand what, or even how we understand the everydayness of xenophobia. For Ndinda and Ndlovu categories of difference like gender and class shape or produce techniques of difference, as they argue that attitudes about who is foreign are dynamic, often fashioned by interconnections and kinship ties between citizens and foreigners.

Nyamnjoh’s (2006) book is based on research that accounts for the experience of women who are migrant workers in Botswana and South Africa. Caroline Kihato’s (2013) more recent book Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-between City places migrant women at the centre of how the city is made, rather than centring women’s invisibility or marginality. In so doing Kihato powerfully expands the normative categories we use to think about belonging such as official and unofficial, legality, illegality or informality, for example. We can draw a connection between Kihato’s method and that presented in the book Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Bettina Malcomess (2013), reviewed in our issue by Mbali Mazibuko. Mazibuko reads the book about Johannesburg as inviting us to think about what the politics of belonging to a city do, when we think of the city as an architecture, a sensorial system, as imagined and as experienced in relations of both enablement and constraint.

One of the most interesting insights offered by Ndinda and Ndlovu’s analysis is that the relations that inform who does and does not belong are made in or as kinship. This is an observation corroborated in the argument presented in Pumla Dineo Gqola’s article for our issue: that it is intimacy rather than distance that produces the effects or relations of xenophobia. Ndinda and Ndlovu’s observations are in conversation with Langa and Kiguwa, who offer the example of the perceived competition for resources “like women” as what mediates or perhaps performs relations between men that they describe as negrophobia (see also Tafira, 2011). Central to how men negotiate a politics of inclusion, Langa and Kiguwa refer to body politics, where the body is marked with accented difference to produce what is a systematic technique of gendered violence (see also Ratele, 2015 and Gqola, 2008).

Our special issue offers a short interview between Jesse McGleughlin and activist Zoe Black. Black refers to her life experience as a black, migrant woman sex worker who loves women, to talk about how belonging, home and foreignness are mediated by gender, sexuality and desire. Black’s reflections share connections with the drawings offered by Nolan Oswald Dennis. Black demonstrates the ways that techniques of sexual difference are necessarily constitutive of the relation of belonging to the nation. Through reference to Sojourner Truth, Black forges a “line of flight” (see Keeling, 2007) that animates our view of border living and border thinking (see Anzaldúa, 1987), demonstrating a case of being a border, demanding forms of justice without seeking repair. When Dennis’s drawings were exhibited at the Goodman Gallery earlier this year, Lindsey Bremner’s words were paraphrased on one wall, stating a different position: “You can be a citizen or you can be stateless but it is difficult to imaging being a border” (Bremner, 2010).

Dennis’s drawings Furthermore and Nation State function as maps or diagrams that extract, trace and project dynamics in the becoming of a nation state, or what he terms as “living in a state of long transition” in the Press Release for the exhibition of the work at the Goodman Gallery. Lines and text are carefully rendered in chalk on black paper, resembling preliminary drawings from a notebook, that schematically analyse a set of relations. In Furthermore the standard coordinates of north and south, east and west are reversed, and located in time against two notated dates, 1994 and 2014. Arrows drawn in each corner indicate movement, visually emphasising the words circulation written above, and rotation below. Words are used sparingly: +Home is written in the top right. Exile, +Labour +Memory, +Fear form a column to the bottom left of the drawing. Rotation +Peace, +Power, +Negation are listed to the right. Each chain of words augments the forces they connote, each acting on the coordinates of a place and time that lie between exile and home.

In Nation State the geometry of the South African flag is taken into a three- dimensional space: the flat colour bands are redrawn as three-dimensional blocks in perspective, separated in this way and suspended in the picture plane. The words +Interior Geometry and +Projection Room are written above the abstracted flag and evoke the psychological and internalised ‘space’ of the emblem, the image of a nation. In the drawing the flag is not a cohesive form any longer. The colour spectrum is reduced to monochrome, and with it the symbolic function of the flag dissipates into an unstable topography, a container open to projections (of territories, pasts, futures, of other countries…). Zoe Black instigates similar border thinking, demonstrated in the opening words of her interview:

The name Zoe Black is a pseudonym.

“I sell the shadow to support the substance” – Sojourner Truth, 1864

Intimacy and/as techniques of difference

Gqola’s article in our issue draws a connection between the invention of foreigners and the creation of vulnerability through an analysis of two short films shot as part of the intervention offered by Filmmakers Against Racism following the 2008 outbreak of violence. Xolisa Sithole’s Thandeka and Martine and Andy Spitz’s Angel’s on Our Shoulders reveal connections between intimacy, nationalism, masculinity and trauma, revealed through the lived experiences of women and girls. Another angle at similar connections is present in Pedzisayi Mangezvo's article. Mangezvo’s work comes out of 15 months of conversation with Zimbabwean men who are migrants who play together in a football team in Stellenbosch. A large strength of Mangezvo’s piece is demonstrated by his method, which relies on intimate conversation with his participants.

Mangezvo suggests that migrancy shifts gendered relations, an observation that also largely guides Ndinda and Ndlovu’s work. We would not be inclined to assume that gender and gendered relations are very coherent, single or stable whether or not a person enters the status of being a migrant. There is something quite interesting about the qualitative account of the changes regarding masculinity that Mangezvo observes, referring consistently to “migrancy” rather than migration. We read this choice and his analysis overall as instigating a view of migrancy as an ongoing process, or becoming (see Braidotti, 2002). For Mangezvo masculinity is provision, that is, that men leave in order to become providers; yet what he demonstrates in this analysis is that masculinity is always provisional. “Shepherding a leopard” is a metaphor Mangezvo carries through his analysis with reference to the relations between men and masculinity. Mangezvo refers to “injury” in this account in ways densely related to the observations made in Malose and Kiguwa, and Gqola’s pieces. Shepherding the leopard is the way he views football and methodology as a scene of negotiation; this metaphor, related to injury, also performs the shifting negotiations of various compensatory masculinities.

Gcobani Qambela’s piece in this issue takes us to another South African university town. While students at the University Currently Known as Rhodes were protesting to force the university to work towards its obligations for decolonisation in 2015, a series of xenophobic incidents occurred in Rhini. Qambela follows discussions of both of these concerns on Twitter, premising his argument on the basis of intersectionality. That is, for Qambela if the terms of student activists and their actions are intersectional, then these decolonial debates necessarily would also be interested and no less invested in actions against xenophobia. We can draw connections between Qambela’s premise and the work of Black and McGheughlin in this issue; Black and McGheughlin draw our attention to the relation between the figure of the stranger and queerness.

‘Intersectionality’ is a term that refers us to the ways that the legal categories of racism or sexism cannot always explain the experiences of people, as it is often a combination of both racism and sexism that informs those experiences (see Crenshaw, 1991). Jasbir Puar (2007) elaborates this term through a critique of queerness as identity; for Puar when queerness is understood as an identity within the discourse of the State that can be encased within containers of identity, queerness gets displaced as being a modality of assemblages, energies, events and spatialities. The stranger is a figure of queerness in Puar’s reading, which is why she moves away from intersectionality. This move away informs the way we read Qambela’s use of and attachment to intersectionality.

Qambela begins with the background of the student movement in Rhini in 2015, referring to a conference in April 2015 titled ‘(Re)Making the South African University: Curriculum Development and the Problem of Place’, which had a specific interest in connecting the relationship between the transformation of higher education in South Africa with a psychosocial understanding of the places where knowledge is produced and exchanged. This conference coincided with a march by various organisations against xenophobia. The students participating in this march are a link between the university, its project, the desire and demand for transformation, and work against xenophobia. Another crucial matter than connects these projects for Qambela is the work concerning gender-based violence.

Qambela’s piece ends with references to #RapeatAzania and #RUReference List, student movements targeted against institutionalised rape culture at the university. This offers a sharp reminder of the ways that techniques of difference rely on the relationship between violence and vulnerability. In a review of Pumla Dineo Gqola’s (2015) book Rape: A South African Nightmare Zuko Zikalala discusses the contribution that the book makes in extending public discussion of rape and rape culture. Zikalala’s review and Qambela’s analysis are forceful in their accounts of how we understand the relationship between space, violence, and affect.

Kezia Batisai’s article in our issue places gender and sexuality at the centre of questions about nation-building in a way that powerfully responds to the questions we posed in our call for papers. Batisai argues that many postcolonial African states have been established with discourses dense in body politics that produce exclusions, giving the example of continued attacks and violence against black lesbians in South Africa. Rather than thinking of the nation as a project of inclusion, Batisai demonstrates the ways that race, gender and sexuality are constitutive projects of exclusion from the body proper. Batisai offers an examination of the subtle and overt institutionalised and everyday technologies of difference that mark the experiences of those constituted as others, but also offers a frame for understanding the foundation and survival of the nation as necessarily mediated through xenophobic grammars.

It has been a generative process of encounters with all of our contributors who have produced interesting, provocative work concerning a set of difficult concerns and debates. We are extremely grateful to all of the wonderful people who offered their time and expertise as external reviewers. Leverne Gething, you have been so excellent and so generous in your capacity as Consulting Editor.

The production of our special issue comes to an end at a very sad time for many of us engaged in African feminist work following the passing of Elaine Salo. Elaine was a tremendous teacher, mentor and friend to many of us at Agenda, and she will be sorely missed. We dedicate our special issue to the memory of her work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danai Mupotsa

DANAI MUPOTSA is a lecturer in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a BA (Africana Studies, Women’s Studies) from Luther College, a BA Hons in Gender and Transformation and MSocSci in Gender Studies from the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, and a PhD in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her work is broadly concerned with intimacy, public culture and sexualities. She teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The postgraduate research that she supervises is generally informed by feminist, anti-racist, queer and affect theories and genealogies of thought and practice. She is currently writing a book titled White Weddings. Email: [email protected]

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt

DOROTHEE KREUTZFELDT is an artist and lecturer in the Division of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Arts. She holds an MA (FA) from the same university. Her artistic work over the last years has largely been defined by painting and collaborations within specific urban spaces. Recent solo exhibitions included Here We (2016, Room Gallery and Projects, Johannesburg) and At Present (2015, Blank Projects, Cape Town). She teaches and supervises at undergraduate and postgraduate level in painting and across different artistic disciplines. She is currently engaged as artist and researcher in a residency programme at the newly founded A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town.

Notes

1. Red, black and white are the colours most used by extremist movements over the last century, including far left, far right, fascist/anti-fascist political parties, anarchist and hate groups, and radical religious parties. See, for example, the flags of the Afrikaner Student Federation, Boere Resistant Movement, the neo-fascist movement CasaPound in Italy, the Ibero-American Front in Mexico, Golden Dawn in Greece, current German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany or AfD), Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamiserung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisization of the West or PEGIDA), amongst others. It is worth noting the controversial campaign poster of the right-wing party Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) in Switzerland in 2007, depicting three white sheep on a red field with a white cross (evidently standing for Switzerland), with one of the sheep kicking out a black sheep towards a white field. The text below reads ‘Creating Security’. The same motif was taken up by the right-wing Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany or NPD), the Democracia Nacional (National Democracy or ND) in Spain and Lega Nord per l’Independenza della Padania (Northern League for the Independence of Padania or Lega Nord/Northern League).

2. The images were first published as gifs, low-res animations, in the online article Jeppe on a Friday Night, on 22 April 2015 (http://www.theconmag.co.za/2015/04/22/jeppe-on-a-friday-night-2/). Hutton photographed the event digitally and in colour, setting the camera to an automatic function that would rapidly capture real time with 15-25 still frames per second. On the day of publishing the article the hostel was reportedly raided in a show of force by police and the South African National Defence Force that resulted in 11 arrests for possession of stolen goods and dagga: http://www.enca.com/south-africa/police-army-show-force, site accessed August 3, 2016.

3. On Thursday evening a building and vehicles were reportedly set alight during protests where calls were made to have foreigners removed from Jeppestown. Hostel dwellers gathered on the Friday morning, and would clash with journalists and police that evening.