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Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town
Recent writing in the anthropology of affect and cognate fields has positioned hope as a useful category with which to examine socio-political life and formulate a political and theoretical response adequate to its form. This dissertation extends this endeavour by exploring the ‘hopeful projects' mo...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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School of African and GenderStuds, Anth and Ling
2021
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| _version_ | 1867613186839019520 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Cupido, Shannon |
| author2 | Mohamed, Kharnita |
| author_browse | Cupido, Shannon Mohamed, Kharnita |
| author_facet | Mohamed, Kharnita Cupido, Shannon |
| author_sort | Cupido, Shannon |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Recent writing in the anthropology of affect and cognate fields has positioned hope as a useful category with which to examine socio-political life and formulate a political and theoretical response adequate to its form. This dissertation extends this endeavour by exploring the ‘hopeful projects' mothers and families undertake in order to secure their children's futures in contemporary Cape Town. Based on ethnographic research conducted with Black mothers between March and October 2018, I argue that the supposedly private maternal hopes my interlocutors hold are in fact indexical of the ways in which social inequality functions and becomes manifest in everyday life and care. Situated at the interface of embodied experience and political histories, their hopes are indicative of how liberal logics of selfextension, self-mastery, and self-maximisation are inhabited to produce alternative futures. At the same time, however, such hopes are continually undone by contexts of intractable structural violence and deprivation, reinvested into normative notions of kinship, domesticity, sexuality, and the body, or marshalled to perform reparative work that should properly fall under the purview of the state. In detailing the ways in which my interlocutors attempt to craft more capacious, more just, and more materially abundant futures for their children, I illustrate the affective entailments of life-building in post-Apartheid South Africa |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/32561 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:32:08.355Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publishDateRange | 2021 |
| publishDateSort | 2021 |
| publisher | School of African and GenderStuds, Anth and Ling |
| publisherStr | School of African and GenderStuds, Anth and Ling |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/32561 Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town Cupido, Shannon Mohamed, Kharnita Hope Futurity Mothering Structural Inequality Post-Apartheid South Africa Recent writing in the anthropology of affect and cognate fields has positioned hope as a useful category with which to examine socio-political life and formulate a political and theoretical response adequate to its form. This dissertation extends this endeavour by exploring the ‘hopeful projects' mothers and families undertake in order to secure their children's futures in contemporary Cape Town. Based on ethnographic research conducted with Black mothers between March and October 2018, I argue that the supposedly private maternal hopes my interlocutors hold are in fact indexical of the ways in which social inequality functions and becomes manifest in everyday life and care. Situated at the interface of embodied experience and political histories, their hopes are indicative of how liberal logics of selfextension, self-mastery, and self-maximisation are inhabited to produce alternative futures. At the same time, however, such hopes are continually undone by contexts of intractable structural violence and deprivation, reinvested into normative notions of kinship, domesticity, sexuality, and the body, or marshalled to perform reparative work that should properly fall under the purview of the state. In detailing the ways in which my interlocutors attempt to craft more capacious, more just, and more materially abundant futures for their children, I illustrate the affective entailments of life-building in post-Apartheid South Africa 2021-01-19T12:15:08Z 2021-01-19T12:15:08Z 2020 2021-01-19T09:33:47Z Master Thesis Masters MSocSci http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32561 eng application/pdf School of African and GenderStuds, Anth and Ling Faculty of Humanities |
| spellingShingle | Hope Futurity Mothering Structural Inequality Post-Apartheid South Africa Cupido, Shannon Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town |
| title_full | Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town |
| title_fullStr | Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town |
| title_full_unstemmed | Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town |
| title_short | Such painful knowledge: hope and the (un)making of futures in Cape Town |
| title_sort | such painful knowledge hope and the un making of futures in cape town |
| topic | Hope Futurity Mothering Structural Inequality Post-Apartheid South Africa |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32561 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT cupidoshannon suchpainfulknowledgehopeandtheunmakingoffuturesincapetown |