Mamphela Ramphele – författare

The essays in "Violence and Subjectivity", written by a distinguished international roster of contributors, consider the ways in which violence shapes subjectivity and acts upon people's capacity to engage everyday life. Like its predecessor volume, "Social Suffering", which explored the different ways social force inflicts harm on individuals and groups, this collection ventures into many areas of ongoing violence, asking how people live with themselves and others when perpetrators, victims, and witnesses all come from the same social space. From civil wars and ethnic riots to governmental and medical interventions at a more bureaucratic level, the authors address not only those extreme situations guaranteed to occupy precious media minutes but also the more subtle violences of science and state. However particular and circumscribed the site of any fieldwork may be, today's ethnographer finds local identities and circumstances molded by state and transnational forces, including the media themselves.These authors contest a new political geography that divides the world into 'violence-prone areas' and 'peaceful areas' and suggest that such descriptions might themselves contribute to violence in the present global context.

Remaking a World completes a triptych of volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. Social Suffering, the first volume, deals with sources and major forms of social adversity, with an emphasis on political violence. The second, Violence and Subjectivity, contains graphic accounts of how collective experience of violence can alter individual subjectivity. This third volume explores the ways communities "cope" with--endure, work through, break apart under, transcend--traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives. The authors highlight the complex relationship between recognition of suffering in the public sphere and experienced suffering in people's everyday lives. Rich in local detail, the book's comparative ethnographies bring out both the recalcitrance of tragedy and the meaning of healing in attempts to remake the world.

In the last three years the migrant labor hostels of South Africa, particularly those in the Transvaal, have gained international notoriety as theaters of violence. For many years they were hidden from public view and neglected by the white authorities. Now, it seems, hostel dwellers may have chosen physical violence to draw attention to the structural violence of their appalling conditions of life. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that the majority of hostel dwellers are peace-loving people who have over the years developed creative strategies to cope with their impoverished and degrading environment.In this challenging study, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele documents the life of the hostel dwellers of Cape Town, for whom a bed is literally a home for both themselves and their families. Elaborating the concept of space in its many dimensions—not just physical, but political, ideological, social, and economic as well—she emphasizes the constraints exerted on hostel dwellers by the limited spaces they inhabit. At the same time, she argues that within these constraints people have managed to find room for manoeuvre, and in her book explores the emancipatory possibilities of their environment.The text is illustrated with a number of black-and-white photographs taken by Roger Meintjes in the townships and hostels.