Fashioning transformation? Implications for the politics of recognition among Cape Town youth

Van Niekerk, Kate

Fashioning transformation? Implications for the politics of recognition among Cape Town youth

Master Thesis

2014

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Political Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis explores the novel idea that fashion may assist in creating social justice and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. 2Bop takes its inspiration from the classic arcade video games of the eighties and nineties, and the experiences of playing them as a child on the Cape Flats. The brand references Cape Flats 'corner shop culture' and 'Kaapse' (Cape Afrikaans dialect) slang. The thesis looks at the literature around the politics of recognition, pioneered by Charles Taylor, in order to try and understand whether a fashion brand with a broad customer base could produce a shared recognition between young people across pervasive apartheid divides - especially in Cape Town, which is still visibly and geographically divided along lines of race and class. The research was done through in-depth open-ended interviews with 35 participants of different races, classes and backgrounds;; as well as fieldwork done in stores where the brand is sold, and at various events around Cape Town. The participants divided roughly into two groups: a more multiracial, middle class group in the Cape Town City Bowl and an entirely coloured, working class group in Bishop Lavis on the Cape Flats. Through two overarching themes that emerged from the data, nostalgia and authenticity, this thesis reveals the complex ways that people identify with their clothing, their history, and one another. Firstly, 2Bop inspires nostalgia for both playing the actual games, as well as the spaces where the games were played. However these experiences are politicized by the environments in which they were set, and reveal the contradictions of a nostalgia for an 'ordinary' childhood on the Cape Flats that involved both pleasure and pain. This sense of nostalgia is rooted in the anxieties of the present and this is illustrated further by the emphasis put on the brand being 'authentic' and the assertion of boundaries between who 'gets it' and who does not. The ideal of authenticity speaks to anxieties of class and race deprivation and social mobility between Cape Town and the Cape Flats ?the fear of 'selling out', the need to remain connected to one's roots without becoming stuck, the desire to feel like one has ownership of an identity as a young person in a fledgling democracy that is constantly in flux.

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