Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp

Abstract

Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of “anxious urbanity.” This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.