SEMIOTIC CITIZENSHIP AND THE POLITICS OF SHACK-BUILDING IN GRAAFF-REINET, SOUTH AFRICA

This chapter argues that shack-building in contemporary South Africa has a semiotic and performative dimension that imagines and prefigures radical democratic futures. Though primarily associated with the cramped living conditions of the dystopian present, shack-building as protest makes tangible and visible on the semiotic landscape the contingency of racialized spatial orders under the hegemony of neoliberal policymaking in the post-apartheid present. We read the current conjuncture through the struggles of landless people for recognition and redistribution in the South African Karoo, as documented in video ethnographies conducted by the Graaff-Reinet-based youth arts research and activist group Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba, which means the “true voice of the land” in isiXhosa. Building on a diagnosis of the racialized territories of power in the arid central region of South Africa articulated in recorded interviews with marginalized small-scale farmers and township residents, we work with sociolinguist Christopher Stroud’s notion of “linguistic citizenship”-which we broaden to “semiotic citizenship”-to analyze a shack built as an act of protest in the town’s peripheral suburb of Asherville in June 2019.