A contextualisation of the 2008 and 2015 xenophobic attacks: Tracing South African necropolitics

Abstract

It has been a decade since the 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Reflecting on these, this article rethinks xenophobia in the country by positioning it as an inevitable and unavoidable symptom of the nation-building project. By connecting the 2008 attacks to similar violence in 2015, it traces socially and politically embedded attitudes that contribute to an environment of hostility and intolerance. The article suggests that these perspectives and policies are fundamentally connected to the necropower that defines South Africanness. It links the violence to historical trends and decisions, and shows that discourses of denialism and exceptionalism are necropolitical in that they render certain bodies as worthy of life in the country, and relegate migrant bodies to zones of figurative and literal death. As such, the article implies that a perspective beyond the confines of nationhood is needed to effect change. In this, a necropolitical lens provides intersectional insight into the last decade of violence and works towards a critique of a simple binary of inclusion/exclusion.