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Occupation against Occupation: Space and Anticolonial Resistance
Author(s) -
JellySchapiro Eli
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
transforming anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.325
H-Index - 9
eISSN - 1548-7466
pISSN - 1051-0559
DOI - 10.1111/traa.12024
Subject(s) - colonialism , resistance (ecology) , dialectic , power (physics) , rationality , context (archaeology) , sociology , oppression , clarity , aesthetics , history , epistemology , political science , law , politics , philosophy , archaeology , ecology , biochemistry , physics , chemistry , quantum mechanics , biology
“The colonial world,” Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “is a world divided into compartments … a world cut in two.” Mapping the geographic rationality of colonial domination allows us, Fanon insists, to “mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be organized.” In this article, I sketch either side of the dialectic to which Fanon gestures–the spatial logic of colonial power, and the spatial logic of anticolonial protest. My analysis focuses on apartheid South Africa, a context wherein the spatial rationality of colonial power was rendered with a particular clarity. Working toward a thematic of anticolonial occupation, I highlight three unique but imbricated sites of resistance: settlement, transportation, and urbanity. From the particular example of antiapartheid resistance, I argue, we can begin to develop a spatial theory of anticolonial struggle that might be brought to bear upon the neoliberal present.