The Centre for Social Sciences Research (CSSR) and the  Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa  (IDCPPA) at the University of Cape Town invite you to join us for a lunchtime seminar on 13 February 2024 at 12:45pm. The seminar will be presented by Leslie Banks.

About the Seminar:

Life after Plastic Bodies: Covid, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in South Africa

This paper explores the impact and implications of the South African state’s adoption of a tough militarised, biomedical, and essentially neo-colonial approach to the management of the Covid pandemic in the rural former Bantustans (“native reserves”) of the country. It argues that, while the ‘war on Covid’ produced new national legislation for all citizens, those living “with custom” in former homelands were said to possess cultural attributes that amplified the risk of infection and death. The paper suggests that families ‘living with custom’ in the former homelands were treated differently from other citizens, constitution what Giorgio Agamben (2003) might call a state of “greater) exception. In the Eastern Cape rural residents used the metaphor of the gate closing on them (ukuvala isango) to describe their experience and exclusion. The paper explores how families fought to restore dignity by exhuming the bodies wrapped in plastic to allow them to communicate with kin and ancestors. It also shows how, after lockdown, vaccination was often treated as a family matter not an individual choice and concludes with a harrowing account of a new epidemic of hunger and malnutrition stalks these landscapes. The paper highlights the limits of narrow bio-medical and individual rights-based approaches in dealing with health, livelihoods, and well-being in communities devastated by Covid in rural southern Africa.

Speakers

Leslie Bank is a Researcher at the HSRC in Cape Town, South Africa, and an Extraordinary Professor of Anthropology at Walter Sisulu University. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University, a Ford Foundation Scholar at Cambridge University, and a Harry Oppenheimer Scholar at Oxford University. His recent books include Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa (2022), Migrant Labour After Apartheid (HSRC Press, 2020), City of Broken Dreams(2019) and Placing the Smart City (2022).

 13 February 2024
 12:45 - 14:00 SAST
  CSSR Seminar Room, 4.29 Robert Leslie Social Science Building, UCT

Hosted by the Centre for Social Science Research and the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa