Selected publications

• A Living Southern Urbanism in South Africa

  2025-12-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Many existing theorisations of southern urbanism on the African continent often frame the Southern Question in polarised terms that are divorced from Gramsci and the broader Marxist tradition. As a result, southern knowledge becomes associated with thinking at a distance from organised traditions of struggle, focused on a distortion or appropriation of post-structural thought, now hiding under a supposedly “postcolonial” veneer. While such framings of the African city have nonetheless proven productive and important, they risk occluding parallel forms of urban movement from below and traditions of political organising that persist into the present. This chapter dialogues with the experiences of Abahlali base Mjondolo, a movement of shack dwellers based in South Africa with two decades of organising experience. It introduces the specific terrain of their struggle for the right to the city; situates their movement in the broader theoretical debates about our era of urban revolution and southern urbanism; and argues for a notion of “living southern urbanism” that better captures the political stakes of thinking from the South, as informed by the lived experiences of organisations like Abahlali.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion: Dignity as Rupture and the “Becoming Black of the World”

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Transition: Fissures in the Time and Space of Democracy

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ruptures: From Post-politics to the Urban Political

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Precarity and Autonomy: Life and Death in the Shacks

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Thinking the World from Durban

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Global Threat of Race in the Decomposition of Struggle (2020)

  2024-12-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Many of the struggles that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis eventually experienced decomposition in the face of multiple internal and external threats. While movement composition and decomposition are inevitable in the natural cycle of popular struggles, this article argues that what David Theo Goldberg has termed “the threat of race” constituted one important factor that brought about the eventual demise of these popular mobilizations. By drawing on the cases of US Occupy Wall Street, European anti-austerity protests, and South African struggles against xenophobia, it points to global continuity in anti-blackness across disparate geographies. As these same regions currently confront the threat of righting authoritarianism, this article argues we must also take a self-reflexive look at the seeds of reaction embedded in otherwise progressive and left-wing formations in order to achieve a more sobering account of our present predicament.

  PublisherDOI

• Development: A Promised Land Called Cornubia

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City

  Contemporary African Political Economy · 2024-01-01 · 14 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dar es Salaam on the Frontline: Red and Black Internationalisms

  Third World Thematics A TWQ Journal · 2022-11-02 · 22 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article highlights Tanzania's role in global decolonisation by combining personal stories rooted in everyday life with political and pedagogical accounts of experiments in African socialism. The Dar es Salaam school of scholars and activists developed into an epicentre of productive and fraught debates that continue to offer us lessons today. By paying close attention to the stories these thinkers tell, and by situating them in the context of both political events and quotidian experiences, we can further uncover what Fanon called the "grandeur and weakness" of anti-colonial praxis. Gendering these syntheses of red and black internationalisms also contributes a perspective rooted in a more radical democratic politics, productively extending this decolonial genealogy into our present conjuncture.

  PublisherDOI