Reworking Citizenship: Race, Gender, and Kinship in South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2024)
By Brady G’Sell
Reviewed by Alisha E. Cherian
New York University
Brady G’Sell’s Reworking Citizenship reckons with the lived experience of liberal democratic citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. In 2014, when the bulk of her fieldwork took place, non-white South Africans had gained the full legal rights of democratic citizenship, and yet, in practice, were still lacking the material guarantees that such citizenship was imagined to confer. G’Sell’s monograph is a critique of this gap between the postapartheid state’s democratic promise and its lived reality. Her main focus, however, is an exploration into how her interlocutors – or, as she refers to them, “the people I know” (xxi) – worked to weave and embed themselves in everyday webs of relationality to gain access to the sorts of resources that citizenship was supposed to entail.
G’Sell’s account draws on ethnographic fieldwork in 2013-2014 with black[1] African, coloured, and Indian women in the low-income Durban neighbourhood, the Point, with shorter visits in 2011, 2012, 2019, and 2022. She conducted over 200 interviews in English and isiZulu, and with the aid of friends and research assistants, in Swahili, isiXhosa, and Setswana as well, a scope reflecting some of the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the neighborhood and G’Sell’s interlocutors. To situate her ethnographic data in a longer history of state-making, she integrates an impressive array of primary and secondary sources from the colonial and apartheid periods, including 235 welfare case files, triangulated with interviews with social workers and oral histories interviews with older mothers.
This rigorous historical depth is showcased in the first half of the book, where G’Sell traces the formation of colonial and apartheid era state welfare policies (Chapter 2) and examines the welfare cases that emerged from them (Chapter 3). She shows how these interventions circumscribed citizenship for white women, making it contingent on maintaining the white family. Thus, motherhood became a racialized and gendered political identity that was both a means of accessing the resources needed for social reproduction and also the grounds upon which one was deemed worthy (or not) of receiving said resources.
The second half of the book turns to the contemporary, where liberal forms of governance restricted state welfare. In this context of meager child welfare grants and a dearth of waged labor, G’Sell follows how black African, coloured, and Indian mothers forged networks of kin in their apartment buildings, neighbourhoods, and communities. G’Sell refers to these practices as “kinshipping”, showing how women leveraged their social positions as mothers (Chapters 4 & 5) and wives (Chapter 6) to secure the material and social resources, such as household appliances and cellphone minutes, needed to cultivate a support system for their children, their domestic lives, and their senses of belonging. Altogether, the book articulates G’Sell’s core argument that these formally bestowed and informally eked out forms of political belonging in South Africa are deeply relational.
G’Sell’s concept of relational citizenship is her central intervention against Euro-American political theory that often treats citizenship as simply a one-to-one relationship between the state and an autonomous individual. Instead, G’Sell expands the field of vision to reveal how the people she knew understood and were enacting citizenship in terms of their relationships of obligation and support with fellow mothers, within larger families, with their neighbours, with the fathers of their children, with their sexual and romantic partners, within prayer groups and religious congregations, and with state representatives. Relational citizenship, therefore, encapsulates both the responsibility towards and desire for social reproduction as well as the ties and interactions through which people accessed the means to sustain social reproduction.
One of G’Sell’s most dexterous moves is to refuse a state-imposed narrative that such relationality stems uniquely from precolonial African kin networks. Chiefly, through her historical analysis, she illustrates that whites in South Africa enjoyed (and set the expectations for) a state-sponsored relational citizenship that was predicated on maintaining the white family as well as bolstered through relational racial hierarchies and the intimate labor (Boris & Parreñas 2010) of black African and coloured women, for example. As such, G’Sell extends what she recognizes as long-established overlaps between the political and the intimate (eg. Stoler 2002) and the economic and kinship (eg. Yanagisako 2002). In the book, she emphasizes that political inclusion was premised on economic inclusion on domestic terms, and crucially, that the three spheres are not just connected but fundamentally co-constitutive.
Importantly, though her research interests lie in motherhood, mothering, and kinship, her use of kinship theory is convincingly grounded in her informants’ own theorizations of their senses of political, economic, and social belonging, or lack thereof. Perhaps the most enjoyable element of the book is her ethnographic writing on the everyday interactions that make up the stuff of relational citizenship. She traces exchanges between women collecting on debts from their neighbors, picking up Child Support Grants for each other, attending prayer meetings with one another, taking turns to watch each others’ children, and using each others’ refrigerators. Throughout the book, G’Sell strikes a careful balance between giving full weight to the diverse strategies people pursued while, at the same time, she avoids falling into the trap of romanticizing them. Instead, the book consistently underscores that these practices were not ends in themselves. Rather, these were efforts oriented towards the ultimate goal of securing waged employment, or “a proper job” (36) – the entrypoint to the liberal citizenship from which these women were excluded.
While firmly situated in the specificity of the Point, Durban, and South Africa, G’Sell also positions her work in a global context where formal waged labor is increasingly scarce yet continues to be the grounds upon which liberal democracy promises inclusion. This problem makes the book a timely intervention in debates on citizenship, formal equality and inclusion, and political and economic belonging. Reworking Citizenship, accessible enough for advanced undergraduate teaching and theoretically meaty enough for a graduate seminar, can find a home on a range of syllabi that are similarly animated by such debates.
Bibliography
Borris, Eileen and Rhacel Parreñas. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stoler, Ann. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yanagisako, Sylvia. 2002. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[1] G’Sell uses South African official and colloquial conventions for naming racial groups, including not capitalizing “black”, retaining the “u” in “coloured”, and capitalizing Indian and African, for example.