Survivalist economics in the time of COVID-19

abstract

Like many countries in the world, the South African Government announced its first national lockdown to curtail the spread of the coronavirus in March 2020. Despite the announcement of these restrictions, which were intended to protect the citizens, destruction of homes and evictions of people living in informal settlements were reported.

Writing against the notion of an ‘exceptional’ time during the experience of COVID-19, in this briefing I offer two terms: ‘survivalist mobilities’ and ‘survivalist economics’ as modes of making life that speak in response to the excess of normative and oppressive conditions.

The case of Bulelani Qolani’s eviction from his home in eThembeni, Khayelitsha, by the City of Cape Town’s Anti-Land Invasion Unit (ALIU) in July 2020 becomes the centrepiece to the examination of the exceptionality of COVID-19 as it pertains to black life, and how the understanding of ‘the human and citizenship’ is articulated and experienced by those living in the remains of trans-historical conditions.

In the first section I introduce ‘black life’ as a frame to work against reading COVID-19 as a singular and exceptional crisis. In the section that follows I introduce the case of Bulelani Qolani’s eviction through the method of ‘the episode’, from which to begin to examine the notion of black life under the conditions of the pandemic. The jarring image of his naked body and the loss of his home resonate with black people’s ongoing relationship to this form of trans-historical dispossession.

keywords:

• South Africa
• COVID-19
• evictions
• black life
• intimacy
• kinship
• ungeographic

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nelly Ganta

NELLY GANTA is a PhD student in the Department of Urban Geography at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her research interests include urban economics, informalities, infrastructure, social infrastructures, and popular economies. Email: [email protected]