Many scholars and South African politicians characterize the widespread anti-foreigner sentiment and violence in South Africa as dislike against migrants and refugees of African origin which they named ‘Afro-phobia’. Drawing on online newspaper reports and academic sources, this paper rejects the Afro-phobia thesis and argues that other non-African migrants such as Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Chinese) are also on the receiving end of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. I contend that any ‘outsider’ (White, Asian or Black African) who lives and trades in South African townships and informal settlements is scapegoated and attacked. I term this phenomenon ‘colour-blind xenophobia’. By proposing this analytical framework and integrating two theoretical perspectives — proximity-based ‘Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT)’ and Neocosmos’ exclusivist citizenship model — I contend that xenophobia in South Africa targets those who are in close proximity to disadvantaged Black South Africans and who are deemed outsiders (e.g., Asian, African even White residents and traders) and reject arguments that describe xenophobia in South Africa as targeting Black African refugees and migrants.
In examining xenophobia in South Africa, scholars have advanced various theoretical explanations to make sense of its causes and nature. Within this paper, I focus on the ways in which multiple structural arrangements create conditions for the manifestation of xenophobia in post‐apartheid South Africa. By drawing on Louis Althusser's notion of ‘interpellation’ and Judith Butler's concept of ‘the subject,’ I disconnect xenophobia in South Africa from the conscious and autonomous human agent and locate it within larger structural frameworks, namely historical residues of othering, neo‐liberal political economy, the exclusionary state and negative media representations of refugees and migrants. I argue that voluntary, conscious attitudes do not primarily lead to violence or other forms of exclusion as some may argue; instead, a constellation of systemic/structural forces shape and inform xenophobic attitudes and violence. This paper asks scholars to look more deeply into the relationship between exclusion/violence and structural constraints than perhaps they have.
This article reports on a study that explored how Eritrean refugees 1 in South Africa-part of a generational wave of emigrants labelled 'generation asylum' by Hepner (2015)-make sense of their refugee experience and identities, herewith referred to as interpretative repertoires. Interpretative repertoires is a concept coined by sociologists, Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) and later adopted by Potter and Whetherell (1987), to refer to the different and at times contradictory ways in which social actors characterise or describe a phenomenon. Five dominant interpretative repertoires were identified based on a discursive analysis of interview transcripts with ten participants living in Pretoria: (1) a 'rights' repertoire; (2) an 'embrace your refugee identity' repertoire; (3) the 'victimised refugee' repertoire; (4) the 'protected refugee' repertoire and (5) the 'criminalised refugee' repertoire. It is argued that participants deployed contradictory and yet complementary repertoires, drawing primarily on lived and imagined experiences in their country of origin and asylum as resources to give meaning to their refugee identities. These repertoires demonstrate refugees' ambivalence. It surfaces tensions they experience between South Africa's constitutional promise and their relative legal security, on the one hand, and the everyday threat of xenophobic violence and negative public sentiment, on the other.
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