Browsing by Author "Vawda, Mehmood"

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    Discourse on civilization: postliberal postsecular histories of the ghetto
    (2024) Toffa, Mughammed Sadiq; Vawda, Mehmood
    This work is a psychoanalytic anthropology of the city in the postcolony. It is located in Europe's most fragile settler colony in the South of Africa, and set within Apartheid's most privileged multi–culture, the Oriental Ghetto of Bo– Kaap, Cape Town. The project introduces the theoretical formulation of ‘Apartheid Orientalism' as the aesthetic classicism of global settler coloniality. Apartheid is the rationalization, industrialization, and massification of colonial relations that condenses world centre and periphery within intimate matrixes of difference that uniquely reveal psychic interiorities (of Self and Other) and material exteriorities (of body and city) as the making of ‘the modern world'. Orientalism dislodges Apartheid from isolation within a normative South African methodological nationalism and peripheral location in the Western Anglo–sphere, toward relocations as avant-garde settler modernism within the global paradigm of settler colonialism and modern world–system analysis. The critical conjugation of ‘Apartheid Orientalism' destabilizes the geohistorical categories within the liberal–secular orthodoxy of both Apartheid historiography as “failed racial state” and Orientalism as “mid–east romance” and reveals the critical conjugation of racial terror and sacred alterity in the modern episteme. Apartheid Orientalism clarifies the order of ‘liberal-secular aesthetics' as the aesthetic idealism of Western Self– and World–making (from Descartes through Kant and Hegel) that gives to the modern the judgment of what is beautiful, right, and good. I confront aesthetic idealism with its Others, the ‘negative' aesthetic of Julia Kristeva and the ‘intransigent' aesthetic of Edward Said, that provide both the coherent figuration of a Master–Subject (‘the designed Self') and the fragmented disfigurations of an Abject–non/Subject (the Native, the Slave, the Oriental). The abject subjectifications of mastery figured in the non-being of ‘Native≠Slave≠Oriental' are ontologically fixed and structurally fragmented within the colonial spheres of the split–off worlds of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. A methodology of ‘boundary–work' and ‘counter–mapping' the city opens a radical phenomenology of colonial mastery: nature mastery binds the Native with the Bantustan complex; technology mastery binds the Slave with the Plantation complex; culture mastery binds the Oriental with the Multiculture complex. The industrial complexes of the modern–colonial episteme produce the National–Tribes (the Eurocentric nation-state) and the Modern–Tribes (the wards of liberal multiculturalism and postmodern identitarian politics). Liberal misrecognition as tribal governance and maintenance reveals the technology of liberal reconciliation. The project calls for the recognition of the sacred and the tragic in modern subjectivity, as the recognition of the postcolony as tragedy. The project offers that the constitution of the ‘immigrant' as Subject in modernity as the global historical conjugation of Native–Slave–Oriental and of postcolonial recognition as ‘immigrant ethics' will bring the postcolony to tragedy and to “a life worth living”.
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    Open Access
    The role of China's 'one belt one road initiative' project in interdependence relations between China and Africa: the case of Ethiopia and South Africa from 1994 to 2019
    (2025) Yildiz, Fatma; Vawda, Mehmood
    China often claims that its presence in Africa is one of solidarity with previous liberation struggles and post-independence countries trying to remove the remnants of colonialism's shackles. Indeed their developmental role, it is claimed, is to achieve this end through a relationship of respect for the sovereignty of states and equality of political relationships and economic development objectives. This study delves into the asymmetrical interdependence relations between China and African countries, particularly Ethiopia and South Africa, within the framework of the "China's One Belt One Road Initiative" (BRI) Project, which claims to enhance connectivity and economic cooperation between Asia, Europe, and Africa. It focuses on the period 1994 to 2019. The study draws on theories of international relations, interdependence, dependency and soft power to provide valuable insights into China's political and economic relationships with these two African countries. These theories offer a focused perspective, enabling us to explore the political and economic factors that underpin these bilateral relations. China's investments, infrastructure projects, loans, aid, and trade in Africa, especially in Ethiopia and South Africa, remain the key pillars of the asymmetrical nature of interdependence relations. It shows the sensitivity and vulnerability of these respective states and their economies and the trend toward greater dependency of African countries on China. China's relations with Ethiopia and South Africa have both successes and limitations. Ethiopia is highly dependent on China due to China's significant investments in the manufacturing and infrastructure sectors, which could lead to a debt trap due to a shortage of credit and loan opportunities from the World Bank, IMF, and Europe, as well as a trade deficit. South Africa, on the other hand, is less reliant on China due to its financial strength, but it is dependent on trade with China, which is dominated by exporting raw materials and importing finished goods, as well as China's public debt. Overall, China has strong interests in maintaining good relations with Africa, particularly Ethiopia and South Africa, for access to raw materials and agricultural products, a growing market for Chinese goods, and diplomatic influence and support, so it appears less reliant and more dominant in its mutual relations with these two African countries. In addition, Ethiopia and South Africa's political and economic significance within the broader context of the BRI provides China with an opportunity to deepen its relationships with Africa as a whole. On the other hand, solidarity and an equal relationship may begin to slip into dependence. Hence, this asymmetrical interdependence relationship may lead to an increasing trend toward dependence relationships due to China's rising economic influence and financial control over Ethiopia and South Africa.