학술논문

'These violent delights have violent ends': Good subjects of everyday South African violence
Document Type
article
Source
Acta Academica, Vol 52, Iss 02, Pp 147-162 (2020)
Subject
violence
crime
subjectivity
vigilante
south africa
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
AZ20-999
Political science
Language
English
ISSN
24150479
0587-2405
2415-0479
Abstract
While the deaths of Mlungisi Nxumalo and Lucky Sefali barely registered in the media and public consciousness, they can be read as an exemplar of South African violence. The more closely we examine this incident, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish those fighting for justice, and those undermining it. The imagined boundaries between law-abiding citizen and criminal become unclear, as does the distinction between the use of force to protect citizens, and the use of violence to damage the social fabric. This leads to critique of the conventional attributions of criminality and ideas about effective criminal justice, and instead to reframing the problem of violence as one of the construction of certain kind of subject, persons for whom the normalised exercise of a variety forms of unrecognised or legitimated violence is part of the texture of everyday life.