Precarious Liberation : Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa

Examines the relationship of precarious employment to state policies on citizenship and social inclusion in the context of postapartheid South Africa.

Millions of black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country’s democratic transition: economic participation has gained centrality in the government’s definition of virtuous citizenship, and yet for most workers, employment remains an elusive and insecure experience. In a context of market liberalization and persistent social and racial inequalities, as jobs in South Africa become increasingly flexible, fragmented, and unprotected, they depart from the promise of work with dignity and citizenship rights that once inspired opposition to apartheid. Barchiesi traces how the employment crisis and the responses of workers to it challenge the state’s normative imagination of work, and raise decisive questions for the social foundations and prospects of South Africa’s democratic experiment.

“A very ambitious and impressive theoretical analysis of employment/waged labor as a signifier of citizenship in a precarious postapartheid economy. A big book, with big ideas.” — Kitty Krupat, The Murphy Institute, CUNY

“Strongly grounded in ethnographic evidence and in theory, this important account of post-transition South Africa describes with great specificity a local phase of a world problem. Barchiesi shows how precariousness emerged as a category, without separating it from proletarianization entirely.” — David Roediger, University of Illinois, Champaign

“Works to establish precariousness as a theoretical paradigm without sacrificing either concrete focus on the local or historical reach.” — Rachel Rubin, University of Massachusetts, Boston

“Franco Barchiesi provides a detailed, critical account of how the discourse and ideology of the postapartheid government cast waged work as a primary source of virtue for social subjects and key to the rights of citizenship, even at a time when employment for the majority of workers is becoming ever more precarious. He adds to this a wonderfully rich ethnographic investigation of workers’ views, desires, and fears regarding work, which are complex and at times surprising. Although firmly grounded in South Africa, Barchiesi’s analysis is essential for anyone trying to understand and contest the intimate relation between work and governmentality.” — Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire; Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire; and Commonwealth

“In his tour de force, Franco Barchiesi shows how the reduction of citizenship to wage labor, inherited from the struggles against apartheid, has left South Africa’s working class defenseless against the neoliberal offensive. Desperation takes over and violence spreads. Capturing disillusionment among subject populations, Precarious Liberation is sure to make waves in the field of South African studies and beyond.” — Michael Burawoy, author of The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition
Published in cooperation with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Press