Abstract
This dissertation is an historically intormed ethnography of conceptions, technologies and practices of citizenship at the contradictory juncture of liberation and liberalization in post-apartheid South Africa. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork and archival research in Soweto and Johannesburg, it is anchored around Operation Gcin'amanzi (Zulu for “Save Water”), a controversial, large-scale project initiated by the recently corporatized Johannesburg water utility to install prepaid water meters (devices which automatically disconnect residents from water supply following non-payment) in all Soweto households. Via an ethnography of the highly conflictual implementation of the project, I explore how urban basic infrastructures become the terrain for the articulation of long-standing questions about the promise of citizenship in the post-apartheid period. Taking this project and the protests against it as an interpretive lens, I explore how political subjectivities are formed at this contradictory moment in which modernist conceptions of freedom and citizenship that animated the liberation struggle have been significantly transformed. I argue that in the aftermath of apartheid, the politics of basic needs and “life itself” — forms of politics which during the anti-apartheid struggle were often subsumed within the political languages of the nationalist movement — have become central to the constitution of the political in a context of neoliberal reform.
