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Alternative by Design

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Embodying Cape Town

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Abstract

The final chapter was inspired by the eruption of something locally referred to as a Toilet War in Cape Town in 2010. The War takes the infrastructural inadequacies of the city as its object. Activists use the somatic components of cleansed urban space at the center of the city and the charged power of waste to force openings in discourses regarding the political legitimacy of the Municipal and Provincial Governments. The post-apartheid transition remains incomplete without the durable counterpart of networked infrastructures. Sanitation infrastructures and households are continuously networked over time with bodily thresholds in ways that stabilize exclusion. It is because artifacts are designed according to the visibility of the sentience implied in them that they modify the way the body is made in turn. Following the work of Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, New York; 1985), this chapter will argue the sentience of racialized bodies becomes increasingly invisible over time to the built environment designed to see it. Contemporary activists are thus lashing out at the very objects that expand rather than reduce the weight of their bodies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri, USA

    Shannon M. Jackson

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  1. Shannon M. Jackson
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Jackson, S.M. (2017). Alternative by Design. In: Embodying Cape Town. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58711-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58711-4_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58710-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58711-4

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