Barchiesi, Franco (2011) Precarious Liberation. Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Price: $29.95 Paperback - 384 pages (ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3610-4)
Published in cooperation with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Press.
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.
CRITICAL PRAISE:
“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
“This is an important and impressive book. In a South African context where wage labor has long been taken as the foundation of modern social citizenship, and where the demand for employment has been the touchstone of nearly all progressive politics, Franco Barchiesi upends conventional understandings through the radical act of listening. By paying careful attention to the words, thoughts, and experiences of wage laborers, he allows us to appreciate the way that wage labor today typically provides not stability and security, but rather uncertainty, resentment, and dissatisfaction, leavened with aspirations for escape from a system of labor increasingly built not on membership and solidarity, but on flexibility and ‘precarity.’ ]A valuable and original work that can help to open up a broader political imaginary of critique than is currently available[, in South Africa and beyond.” — James Ferguson, author of Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order
“Precarious Liberation provides a powerful and deeply innovative analysis of postapartheid predicaments, and is destined to become a classic. Focusing on the widespread collapse of formal employment since the early 1990s, Barchiesi sheds new light on the tensions between workers’ views of employment as frail and precarious, and official notions of the ‘dignity of work’ as inextricably linked with active citizenship. Yet he also emphasizes that precariousness is not just a condition of domination and disempowerment, but contains the possibility of alternative imaginations.” — Gillian Hart, University of California Berkeley and University of KwaZulu-Natal
Franco Barchiesi is Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the coeditor (with Tom Bramble) of Rethinking the Labour Movement in the ‘New South Africa.
