A sweeping historical and
political analysis with detailed ethnographic fieldwork of the
politics of everyday life in postcolonial Africa.
In
post-apartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population
lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing,
people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state's radar.
Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. In
Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson follows this journey from
avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the post-apartheid
Constitution shifts squatters' struggles onto the judicial register.
Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations
in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers' struggles, Levenson further
demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of
all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a
threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in
evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with
subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence.
Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this
book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way
ethnographers think about politics.
