Panel 65: Practices and Discourses of Emancipation in Southern African Localities

Scholarly engagements with Southern African struggles for liberation have often been criticized for using binary frameworks of interpretation, such as the collaboration vs resistance paradigm. This panel invites to explore the diverse and multiple ways in which different actors in Southern African societies have envisaged, sought to promote or contested political, economic, and social change at a grassroot level. The aim is to develop understandings of change that challenge binary frameworks. More specifically, the presenters are encouraged to examine practices and discourses of emancipation in different localities and at different points in time with focus on the 20th century.

Conflicting visions and strategies of change become clear for example through an analysis of patterns of violence in the townships of South Africa. Violence was regarded by various actors as a means to achieve political and socio-economic rights but was simultaneously highly contested within the township communities. Another way of bringing into view emancipatory practices and impulses is to examine local activism around access to basic resources such as education, water and land. Such impulses on a grassroot level are often overseen in dominant narratives of liberation and democratisation.

Contributions are invited from all disciplines and on all regions in Southern Africa.